To answer Doug’s question…..and for anyone else who is using wordpress….or is curious….

WordPress allows you to purchase a domain name under Options>Domains. This is a newish feature, which is just great for the average blogger like myself who doesn’t want to go into hosting, or more complex alternatives. Just use any domain register to see what’s available before going back to WordPress to register (since WordPress doesn’t provide that search facility).

Just put in your required domain, and the whole process is approved and paid via paypal in a trice. Also the routing is instant! Why did I bother to register my domain? Because searching earlier this year I discovered that many I am interested in were already gone. I just had to grab the only one that was left that would relate to my online efforts.

For Australian’s who are wondering at the lack of ‘au’? We have much stricter rules around domain registration – so to have a ‘com.au’ or ‘net.au’ for example, I would have had to provide information about my registered company or business. Now that’s a direction I have NO plans on ever going….and it is just so easy to tell people at a professional learning session that the blog URL is ‘judyoconnell.com’. Even though WordPress does a great job in providing information for google indexing and other crawlers (and all anyone ever has to do is go to Google and search heyjude or judy o’connell) I know I still have teachers I work with who find that a bit confusing. So a simple URL is a professional must for me.

My new URL is http://judyoconnell.com, though the full URL at http://www.judyoconnell.com also works.

Of course, my WordPress URL still works at https://heyjude.wordpress.com because I have not moved the blog, just pointed the new domain name to my blog URL. All very smooth via WordPress.com.

I will keep this domain, but how I might be using it in the future might be quite different. For example, my friend John Connell has ‘gone the full hog”. His domain sits here, and his blog (which he arranges his own hosting for having downloaded WordPress from WordPress.org) sits here.

Technorati does not cope with two URLs for one blog – so rankings on the new domain are back to the millions, and the heyjude.wordpress domain will stall and go backwards. Of course, we all know that technorati rankings are artificial – so as Matt says from Wordrpess – enjoy blogging without them 🙂

On the WordPress downside – I have lost the record of all my ‘incoming links’ in my Dashboard.  Sorry friends – that was a way that I kept tabs on our global conversation. I guess we will just have to ‘talk together’ some-more 🙂