hello, michael.werneburg.ca
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
I've just taken my website to a new domain. It's michael.werneburg.ca, and long may it prosper. The previous domain was emuu.net, which I ran for 15 years from 2004 until today. Prior to that, I had a site on the etherlabs.net for six years, which I owned but shared with various other projects.
Here's why I moved after all this time.
Because Google
At the beginning of the year, all traffic to emuu.net died overnight. I'd configured it with a very high cache timeout to utilize the various cache services out there. This was done to reduce traffic to my site, and to keep the apparent speed up for the reader. But doing that limits my sense on actual page loads so I also set it up to load a single .css from a subdomain (ww.emuu.net) where I had caching suppressed. This meant that the tiny .css would load every time regardless of the caching on the main content. It was a simple page view counter.
It seems that at some point crooks and worse must have started using similar techniques. Perhaps for attack purposes, I don't know. But ww.emuu.net is now flagged by the browser manufacturers or the search sites as a source of bad things. So my domain was effectively blacklisted and all my content was dropped by Google.
And Google now controls more than 92% of all search traffic (97%+ on mobile), so my site fell from ~300 page views a day to <10.
Live and learn!
Because Werneburg
As I've noted in this site, my last name is rare: about as rare as my first name is common. But rather than wait for someone to register werneburg.ca, I decided to do so. This not only protects the domain for myself, but allows me to turn over space on the server for any projects of my kids. They can use theboy.werneburg.ca and thegirl.werneburg.ca or whatever domains they like. Who know, maybe they'll have no interest and it'll be a grand-daughter to whom I'll find myself showing the ropes.
Because Canada
I chose .ca over .net, which I've used for 21 years, because I'm Canadian and .ca has proven reputable (unlike, say .us or .cn or .ru). Go Canada!