Testing.com URLs no longer work
I’ve sold testing.com, partly because I got offered enough money, partly because exampler.com really reflects better what I do today, and partly because I like to force myself not to cling to the past. If marick@testing.com is in your address book, please change it to marick@exampler.com.
All the content for testing.com has been transferred here. There are two simple rules to convert from old to new URLs:
-
If the page is a blog entry, replace “testing.com/cgi-bin/blog” with “exampler.com/old-blog”. Here’s an example:
Old: http://www.testing.com/cgi-bin/blog/2004/05/14/#mindset
New: http://www.exampler.com/old-blog/2004/05/14/#mindset -
Otherwise, replace “testing.com” with “exampler.com/testing-com”. Here’s an example:
Old: http://www.testing.com/writings/process-and-personality.html
New: http://www.exampler.com/testing-com/writings/process-and-personality.html
To those of you who will dutifully change links: I thank you, I appreciate it, and I regret the inconvenience. Next time I see you, I’ll buy you a drink or trinket of your choice.
I was hoping the buyer would leave the non-root pages redirecting to the current pages for a time, but as of today they’re not.
June 5th, 2008 at 10:13 pm
Fantastic. Well, not really.
But brave. Brave is good.
Next time in Toronto, I’ll take that first round.
July 23rd, 2008 at 11:12 pm
That’s frustrating. I assumed someone had stolen the domain; it didn’t occur to me that you might have sold it to a spammer voluntarily.
I like to think that some of the things I write will be of interest a few hundred years, or at least ten or twenty years, in the future, and some of those things are in hypertext — they derive some of their meaning from the web of other documents they’re embedded in. When the links in those documents break, that meaning becomes that much harder to unravel.
In the past, I could sort of rely on community standards to some extent; “cool URLs don’t change”, the Blogger invention of the “permalink”, and so on. But your choice has made it clear that you aren’t part of any community that might subscribe to such a set of standards, so I can’t even get indignant about it any more. You’re someone I have a lot of respect for. So what can I do?
July 25th, 2008 at 10:09 am
Actually, one of the incentives to sell it is how often spammers use “test@testing.com” as the From address when they’re testing their mail-shot or other nefarious programs. Nothing like getting a phone call at 3 a.m. from someone upset that their website is getting flooded by registrations from test1@testing.com, test2@testing.com, test3@testing.com, …
So it’s not *necessarily* the case that the sale meant the spam.
As for the rest… when you sit in judgment on me, you’ll have to weigh the good against the bad.