So I’ve been going back and forth about what I want to do with my personal domains. I have two, judisohn.com and momathome.com Momathome.com is legacy. It doesn’t make a lot of sense now, given what I do for a living, but it was my first identity on the web and I know there’s a lot of history out there tied to it. I primarily use it now for the kids’ email and it redirects to judisohn.com.

I started transitioning the web side of things to judisohn.com but my heart wasn’t in it. It came down to the fact that all the hassles of maintaining a domain just aren’t worth it to me anymore. I’m no longer concerned with who can find me through a random Google search. I only care about the people in my network and extended network… nonprofit geeks, knitters, friends, family, techies etc. If anything, I can’t stand when some stranger not connected to any community I care about emails me about an ancient post. I’m a totally different person now, with different perspective and goals. 

Posterous is a good fit for me, and I love that I only focus on content and they do the rest. Posting by email means I have a backup. It’s by no means perfect, but good enough.

This morning I went to log in to my old WordPress blog for some reason I can’t remember right now and saw this:

Oh that’s just grand.

I logged into Webmaster tools, found what the offending code was and managed to remove it, no easy feat since my browsers weren’t thrilled with even letting me in to the WP admin page. It was a line of script on the most recent post pointing to some malware site I obviously won’t say here. I found the exact issue on the WordPress support site if anyone is interested. Looks like an issue with a MediaTemple (gs) database, although they’d probably deny it.

That was the final straw. I’m done with personal website hosting and I’ll save $125 a year to boot. 

I’ve requested through the Webmasters tool that Google re-review my site so browsers won’t complain, and then I’m redirecting judisohn.com and momathome.com here once and for all. I have no idea how long it will take for Google to clear the domain. 

I have an up-to-date export of all the old blog’s content which I’ve been trying to get imported. If the import doesn’t work, maybe I’ll set it up on a WordPress.com site to have as an archive. Then I can ask Google (once again through the Webmasters tool) to re-index the domain and call it a day.

Apologies in advance for all those old URLs that will break. It’s going to happen, can’t lose sleep over it. Time for a fresh start.

And I’m sorry if anyone gets malware from me.

Update: I’ve found more information about what got into my site. I found this post, and sure enough there were multiple “JohnnyA” administrators in my site. I’ve deleted them all, and hopefully my site will be re-cleared by Google and redirected to Posterous before whatever happened happens again. Seems like MediaTemple has a problem on their hands, soon enough it won’t be my problem too.