Owen the Ninja is no more, welcoming Owen the Dev!

I’ve had a bit of a history with “vanity” TLDs, as they’re so called. In 2015, I decided to buy owenthe.ninja, after seeing that it was available. I thought it would be a pretty cool domain, and four years later, it still is a pretty cool domain. However, it’s not the most professional thing ever. Sure, anyone under 20 thinks it’s really cool, but anyone over 20 just gets really confused in how to spell out the URL. Some examples include:

  • owen.theninja
  • owenthedot.ninja
  • owen.ninja
  • owentheninja.com
  • And so on and so forth

So, to try and resolve this issue, I bought owenthe.tech in 2017. I thought it was a more professional domain name, that would tell the world that I was tech-focused.

Only issue – .tech domains cost a fortune, and owenthe.tech really doesn’t slide off the tongue. At all. Try it. See, it really doesn’t!

 

Fast forward to 2019, and I see that Google Registry now has .dev domains available, and I can get one through my domain registrar, Namecheap. Awesome! I hop on over to the domain lookup, and well wouldn’t you look at that. owenthe.dev is available!

And so I bought my third vanity domain. Unlike owenthe.tech, I’ll actually use this one!

 

There’s a few reasons why I’m switching to owenthe.dev, and instead abandoning owenthe.ninja, but I think they’re all for the better.

Number 1 – You know what I do just from my domain name

While my logic behind “ninja” now being associated with someone doing something well in modern culture continues, you still don’t really know what I do from just my domain name. Am I a soccer ninja, a football ninja, a dancing ninja? I could have bought owenthedev.ninja, but as a quick reminder I bought the original owenthe.ninja in 2015. I had no clue I’d be doing what I do now.

owenthe.dev makes it obvious from the instant you see (or hear) it that I’m a developer. And that’s what I do! I’m about 99.99% sure I’ll continue on my career track as a developer, and I think having owenthe.dev will really work out in the long run.

 

Number 2 – owenthe.dev sounds a lot less cheeky than owenthe.ninja

owenthe.ninja sounds cool. To anyone under 20. But if I try to give my email address to someone who’s over 20, this is usually what happens:

  • Wait what is that owen.theninja? owenthe.ninja?
  • Oh interesting cool domain
  • (Realizes that what a loser this dude is)

While .dev is still very much a “vanity TLD”, it’s a lot less of a vanity TLD. And it actually sounds relatively professional, and exudes that I’m a developer.

 

Number 3 – owenthe.dev is just cooler

Honestly the title is it, it’s just cooler.

Well I mean I think it’s cooler

 

Since I’ll be changing my “brand identity” to owenthe.dev, of course, many changes are coming in terms of how domains will be redirected, and all that fun stuff. See the list below for estimated dates of when changes will occur.

 

The progress of these changes will be updated as I continue to make changes to my web configuration.

 

April 14 – Initial domain & HTTPS setup

Because .dev domains are registered through Google, they’re all in the HSTS list, meaning all .dev domains require HTTPS. I get it Google, you’re trying to be secure, but let’s be real here, you still collect shitloads of user data. HTTPS doesn’t change that. How ironic!

In all serious, of course setting domains to HSTS by default is good, but it means additional time to get Let’s Encrypt and the initial DNS settings up and running.

This process has been completed.

 

April 15 – The site name changes to owenthe.dev, and all requests to owenthe.ninja will redirect to owenthe.dev

The title says it all. On April 15, I’ll be changing site URLs and such to owenthe.dev from owenthe.ninja. That means hopefully not breaking my WordPress install in the process.

Additionally, any requests made to owenthe.ninja with a trailing query will get automatically redirected to owenthe.dev. This means that if you request owenthe.ninja/stuff, you’ll be redirected to owenthe.dev/stuff.

Double additionally, I’ll finally start redirecting requests from owenthe.tech and www.owenthe.tech over to owenthe.dev.

This process has been completed.

 

April 17 – Any services hosted on subdomains of owenthe.ninja will be switched to owenthe.dev subdomains, and any requests will be redirected

As the title says, any services hosted on subdomains will be redirected on April 17 to subdomains under owenthe.dev. This migration will take place across April 17, as I’ll have to set up new SSL instances for these subdomains. These subdomains will be migrated on April 17:

  • pwarchives.owenthe.ninja
  • piefrodo2k16.owenthe.ninja
  • status.owenthe.ninja
  • ipv6.owenthe.ninja (some more minor updates will also be made to the IPv6 detector come April 17)

There will be some subdomains that on April 17 will be “half migrated” to owenthe.dev, meaning that subdomains will exist on both owenthe.ninja and owenthe.dev until the date listed below:

  • snowdayapi.owenthe.ninja – owenthe.ninja subdomain will be operational until December 31, 2019

 

This process should take about 1-2 hours, and may result in some downtime on the server.

 

April 23 – Mail aliasing will begin for any email addresses under owenthe.dev

To help translate for non-tech folks out there: I’ll be setting up my usual email addresses under owenthe.dev on April 23. However, all of this mail will be redirected to their appropriate addresses under owenthe.ninja.

 

April 30 – o355.us will be deprecated

Did you know that I’ve been spelling it wrong the whole time – It’s deprecated not depreciated

Regardless, as the birth of a new domain arises, one must also set sail into the night. o355.us is now ready for deprecation.

Beginning on April 30, all DNS records will be removed from o355.us. Additionally, any email to an o355.us address will likely bounce back. The mailbox is now unused, and I had to get Namecheap to set up a spam filter because somehow the email leaked and it was getting spammed every day.

 

After this, I’ll turn off auto renew, the domain will go up for sale sometime in early 2020.

 

Long-term service changes

The service changes listed above are for the short-term, within the next few weeks of publishing this post. However, there are many other smaller changes that will occur within the next couple of months.

August 30 – Any emails sent to an owenthe.ninja email address will be forwarded a corresponding owenthe.dev email address

This means that similar to owenthe.dev email addresses before August 30, any email sent to an owenthe.ninja email address will be forwarded to owenthe.dev.

September 5 – owenthe.ninja officially enters long term support mode

After September 5, no services will actively be using owenthe.ninja. As a result, owenthe.ninja will enter LTS mode, meaning that while I’ll keep owenthe.ninja around until I get my next domain, owenthe.ninja will be used for redirection only.

 

As I change my domain name from owenthe.ninja to owenthe.dev, just note, I’m still the same person. Nothing is changing with me, I’ll still keep working on the weirdest projects ever, and I’ll keep writing blog posts about really stupid stuff.

(sorry if you couldn’t read this post – Yoast scores this as a 51 on the Flesch Reading Scale)

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