Every few years I go through a minor digital identity crisis and begin reworking my online presence. For a time I even considered dropping my actual first name and branding as Otto Linke, an idea which I still have to resist, especially because I managed to snag that Twitter name (while @andrewlinke has been owned by some who, while no doubt a wonderful human being, has not posted in years). I have resisted the urge, however, until now.

This time around, I decided to give in and relocate my internet home to andrewlinke.com.

As with many things in life, the bedclothes-buried pea which drove me to actually make this change was a seemingly minor irritant which had grown to become an ongoing annoyance: Autocorrect.

I use Apple products, for the most part. I write on a MacBook or iPad and stay in contact via an iPhone. All of these have system-wide autocorrect and Apple’s autocorrect hates the domain name alike.com.

See. it just happened.

I swear, I am not faking this.

I just tried to type A L I N K E DOT C O M and the delightfully helpful autocorrect demons decided that I must have intended to type a domain name which (as of this writing) loads incredibly slowly, then appears to redirect into some sort of webpage-roulette in which the options are:

• Continually “loading”
• Database errors

• A Facebook knockoff

• And what appears to be a link farm intended to boost the page rank of various adult websites that give off a strong “we’d like to sell your credit card number to Eastern European organized crime families” vibe.

…

…

Oh, never mind.

The point is that if I’m getting weary of retyping my domain name three times every dog blessed time I want to share it with someone, then there’s at least a small chance that others might be having the same difficulty. Sure I could teach my own devices to prefer my domain name, but with Windows and even Linux beginning to include system-wide spell checking, I think I’m safer just moving to a longer (and less likely to be corrected) domain name. At least now I’ll just send people to visit a graphic designer if the digital gnomes decide that my name ought to be transformed into a pleasing verb or overused comparative interjection.

So I welcome you to my new home on the interwebs.

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