RSS users may have already noticed this a week ago. .beer domains are $20 a year (they were $30). In addition to this, I was paying $9 a year for an SSL Certificate and $1 a month for an additional IP address for the VPS. $45 a year to have my .beer domain up and running. Not a huge expense when you put it on the table like that but when you combine that with the fact I was maintaining two different WordPress installations and not posting more than once a month to the beer blog, it was time to merge the two.
We’ve been here before.
In 2007, I had 10 different blogs. They were all merged and became this blog you see. I did a merge of 4 into 1 in 2004. Luckily, from 2007 to 2012, I maintained just one blog. The idea to add a beer-only blog was the last time I’ll make that mistake. I had started posting beer posts to the blog and a few readers wrote to let me know they didn’t want alcohol on my blog because they were recovering alcoholics. I took this very seriously and I took action to ensure I don’t offend them. Since 2012, Facebook has grown significantly and in 2013, I left Facebook and this blog is my only outlet to get things of my chest now and I’m lucky that no one reads this blog except my mother.
This means, I can continue making this blog exactly what I want which means when I wanted to write about Golf R mods or Bike things or travel or beer or wine or buying a house, I could do that because no one really wrote in to tell me that I should stop. All of the traffic on this blog comes from Google. Goodbye readers, it was nice to have you.
My point is, merging the hundreds of beer posts into this blog breaks google for a few minutes but Google will recover and there are no major breaks on the Internet by doing this. The old blog is gone, never to return. I’m going to make a few hard code changes today via SFTP eliminating links to the .beer blog completely. The domain will expire in a few years and all will be right with the world.
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I think that I’m going to merge some of the beer categories though. “Year in review” as a category made sense on the beer blog. It doesn’t make sense on this blog because when someone clicks it, it’s going to be all about beer. So…a bit of massaging of the archives is in order.
Thanks for stopping in!