Welcome to juanca.org

From now on, the domain for this site will be juanca.org.

This new identity aligns with my new focus — shipping my writing and work into my own beautiful domain name as easy and fast as possible.

Let's dive into why I made this change.

A short and sweet domain

Someday in 2021 I bought the juanca.org domain, ironically, just in case. Juanca is the nickname that I use and how most people address me, and .org is a recognized TLD, so I said to myself "why not? Maybe I'll use it later".

Incredibly, this "just in case" decision saved my present self just one year later. Six letter domain with the third most popular TLD in the world (according to w3techs).

Getting rid of the "rrillo" of my domain makes it easy to learn and pronounce, and it's easier for my mom to type the whole URL, so it's a win for everyone.

Practicality, recognition and trust

Miguel de Icaza, Nat Friedman, Moxie Marlinspike, Marco Arment, Richard Socher, John O'Nolan and Steve Wozniak are just seven of many Software Engineers who use a short domain with their names (or nicknames) and .org as TLD for their personal site.

Most people in the world recognize the .org top-level domain thanks to popular sites like Wikipedia and freeCodeCamp.

So, if you were wondering if this is a good decision and if other people are doing this, they've been doing it for years... since it was introduced in 1985.

Also, .com, .net and .org are the most popular TLDs that have NONE registration restrictions and open to be used by anyone for anything. Use them for whatever you'd like, commercial or non-commercial use.

The migration

Migrating can be a little tricky, but it all boils down to setting up 301 redirects for your website, just like it's mentioned on Webnames.ca's blog:

A 301 redirect tells Google that your website is permanently moving to a new domain. While Google supports different types of redirects, 301s are the preferred method.

Make sure to apply the 301 redirects on a page by page basis. While it’s much easier to redirect every page to your new home page, it hurts continuity and the overall user experience.

If you have old pages that no longer serve a purpose, create a 404 page to inform customers that the page no longer exists. If possible, offer some relevant content to them so that they can stay on your site.

If you want the step-by-step version, check out my guide on how to change your Ghost site to a new domain.

Code syntax highlighting

The most important new feature that I added to the site was code syntax highlighting using the prism.js library. When writing technical content, example code needs to be shown to the reader. And the way that the Journal theme does it by default just doesn't cut it.

The changes include the following:

• Coy theme for code blocks.
• Show code language on code blocks.
• Copy to clipboard button.
• Highlight syntax for default languages like HTML, CSS, JS.
• Highlight syntax for Bash and Python.

You end up with beautiful code blocks like these:

def greeting(name):
  print('Hello, ' + name)
  
greeting('World')

function greeting(name) {
  console.log("Hello, " + name);
}

greeting("World");

That's pretty much it for now. See you until next time!