48 hours (-ish) later…
…and the new site is running swimmingly. I've been too busy since the Hard Launch to check the stats. But when I published the weekly Commotion of Apple News Links, Ghost (as usual) confirmed that it had been posted on the site and emailed to [X]-many members.
X was a high enough number to inspire delight. It was quite a reassuring thing. I don't have a business plan for the site per se, but I always had a few post-launch progress markers in the back of my mind. The scale starts with "the 20 or so friends who have access to it seem to be reading what I post, more often than not" and it ends with "An American oligarch purchases the site for a nine-figure sum, in a transparent attempt to pursue some kind of mysterious agenda which can't possibly work out well for anybody. Except for me, because I could then afford fancy things like healthcare and those styles of Casio watches that come in metal cases instead of resin ones."
We're not even close to the latter yet (I'll be sure to keep y'all in the loop). But we're at the stage I was conservatively hoping it'd be in six months' time. Thanks!
Naming Rites
I wasn't joking in the post that officially launched this site: I really did make an impulsive (but correct) decision. I'd intended all along to make the announcement during MacBreak Weekly. The impulse came on the morning before this week's show, and I only had something like 45 minutes to write that post.
There wasn't any time for finesse. Or copy editing.
If there had been, I might have taken the time to explain the name of the site.
I've been blogging roughly since the start of the millennium. This new site was always going to be a necessary top-to-bottom relaunch. I gave some thought to a new name.
My first blog (hand-coded in BBEdit and manually updated via FTP) was entitled Yellowtext. It came about because in the funky-fresh trailblazing days of Web 1.0, yellow text on a black background was considered a perfectly reasonable choice, even amongst polite society.
("Yellowtext" lives on: I use it as the category tag for posts that have some kind of a personal vibe, or are of a "blogging about the blog" nature.)
When I moved on to the CMS that I built by hand (WordPress didn't exist yet), I redubbed my personal site "Andy Ihnatko's Celestial Waste of Bandwidth." Back in 2008, Internet speeds were so dismal that the only advantage of loading up a page from the Web over just phoning the author directly and asking them to read it to you was that you'd avoid that awkward initial "who are you and how the hell did you get my number?" phase of the conversation. My readers would have to wait patiently for 1K of HTML and a 12K graphic to load in like an ocean megaliner slipping into a dock. I felt that setting expectations low was a good defensive strategy.
It's still a spiffy masthead! But I decided that this title's time had passed.
"Ihnatko.com" was probably the inevitable title. I just didn't fancy having to spell it out letter by letter every time I was on someone's radio show or podcast. I felt I should ponder some alternatives.
I had a genius idea:
Whenever a tech journalist reaches out to Apple for an official statement about a future plan, no matter how trivial it was, ("Rumor has it that you plan to continue to produce computers and other consumer technology; can you confirm?") they'd respond with "Apple does not comment on unannounced products."
So, obviously, the name "Unannounced Products" would grant my new site an immediate reputation and impact: Apple would be promoting the site by name on a nigh-weekly basis!
I bought the URL. I designed a logo. Ultimately, I calmed down and recognized that this name and URL would be hysterically funny for about two weeks. Forever thereafter, it'd be a joke that I'd have to keep explaining over and over again.
So, "Ihnatko.com" it is. It's the only correct choice. This isn't a personal blog…nonetheless, it reflects the perspectives, interests, and opinions of a single tech pundit. Like "Celestial Waste of Bandwidth," the label on the tin explains what's inside.
There was this one funny thing, though.
Friends with kids have explained the process of naming their newborns. They considered a long list of names, each one backed by a unique and compelling wisdom or personal connection. But ultimately they looked at the kid, and a name immediately stuck.
The URL for this site is "Ihnatko.com". But in the early days of designing a logo-slash-masthead, I put my last name up there, and it just…didn't look right. I added some needless text before and after, just to sort of break up the intensity (and mute the ego a bit). And ever since, in my mind, its official name has been "This Is Ihnatko Dot Com."
The parents of a son or daughter who answers to "Ore-Ida" in flagrant defiance of what was written on their birth certificate nine years ago understand completely.