2009, I registered “hackensplat.com”. A friend of mine called me “Wilhelm von Hackensplat” as a joke after my rather loud sneezes. It was about this time I decided to start writing about software development and technology. I liked the idea of having an alter ego. I pictured him as an evil genius, Baron von Hackensplat, and so hackensplat.com was born, an evil genius writing about his evil technologies.
That was the idea, but it never really took off in my mind. I would have an idea to write about something but it wouldn’t really lend itself to the evil genius persona. As time passed I would got bored with the alter ego and gave up writing for the character, instead just writing as myself. I later changed the name of the website to “Hackensplat Industries”, mainly so I could keep the name.
Even more time passed and I wrote a new piece that I wanted to show a friend. I read out the address as “hackensplat dot com”. My heart sank as the response came back “How do you spell that?”. A question I had been asked too many times before.
I almost registered hackandsplat.com as a redirect, but frankly I was over it. One of the reasons I was writing was to gain a little professional exposure but this other name was just getting in the way. I made the decision and started moving all my published posts to billpg.com, a domain I had previously used as my strictly personal website, distinct from my professional site. There wasn’t anything on my personal domain other than a collection of social media links anyway.
I don’t know how long I’ll keep the old domain, which now only has a set of redirects. It expires in November this year so I suspect I’ll be spending a little bit of October looking at access logs. Equally likely is that I’ll completely forget and it’ll automatically renew anyway.
Welcome to billpg industries.
