As of today I’ve dropped the www prefix to this site’s address.

While in most ways this change is aesthetic only, it does have technical ramifications.

Cookies for the old site have become obsolete.  This helps me in two ways.

First: All previous theme switches are now invalid.  Everyone should be looking at the same thing.

Second: All commenters have to reenter their data.

That last one presents the most significant issue to all of you.  If you don’t remember what username and/or e-mail address you were using to comment, the major information needed for you to bypass moderation, send me an e-mail and I’ll tell you.  If that’s too much trouble, just enter what you want to use and I’ll reauthorize that information to comment without a need for me to review and approve what you have to say.

The only other notable effect is that all internal links now appear unread (your browsing history for the site has been invalidated).  That can’t be helped.

Why did I make this change?

I have further plans for subdomains of xenogere, such as my photoblog, xenogere unseen.  Dropping the www appeared an easy way to begin differentiating the sites, both technologically and otherwise.

More importantly, using just the domain name for the blog helps simplify the experience of finding me and accessing the site.

Another piece of the puzzle is that the www was, at best, gratuitous.  It’s never been necessary, but it’s always been more trouble than it was worth.

As for links to www.xenogere.com, those will continue to work.  I have DNS and address rewrite controls in place to ensure anything using the old style will automatically get redirected over to the new one.