After almost eight years, this blog has officially become a dot com site.  From quietly existing as runningpinoy.wordpress.com, we are now runningpinoy.com!  Aside from an address change, here are a few changes you may expect and the reason for this jump.

From the very start, I really intended not to spend a single dime on this blog as I don’t want to make it commercialized.  I thought that if I spend then I’d want to earn, and with that the quality of my blog may be compromised.  For the longest time I had relied on the free services of WordPress, but a devious event more than a year ago changed all that.

More than I year ago, I was a victim of cybersquatting.  Someone else had registered runningpinoy.com.  I was shocked.  The thought of losing my online moniker “runningpinoy” was just appalling.  What can I do?  If this person would be successful in posing as me, I’d lose all that I’ve worked on for years.  At that time, I can do nothing to bring back the domain, but it triggered me to take my runningpinoy handle in major social media sites like Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr, to name a few.  If it wasn’t for a friend who found this fraudster, I wouldn’t have known that I had a doppelganger.

I basically killed off my doppelganger by not acknowledging its presence.  Sure, I made it known that runningpinoy.wordpress.com is the real McCoy, but that’s it.  Still, it managed to mislead some folks I know from ad agencies and even tricking some people to “like” the fake runningpinoy page (likes that should’ve gone to my official Facebook page).  I guess the local running community is much smarter than my doppelganger had anticipated so after a year, I guess he didn’t yield any returns in his investment, and his domain registration expired.

Still, I didn’t take that opportunity to take runningpinoy.com.  I was still stubbornly thinking that since I successfully conquered my poser, life goes on as usual.  And it did go as usual, with the domain registration of runningpinoy.com never coming to mind…until earlier today.

When I logged in into my WordPress dashboard, I saw a banner saying something like “register runningpinoy.com for $18.”  I guess that’s not too bad so I read further.  And then after reading all the texts and doing some rate conversions, I gave in.  This blog had given me so much already; it’s about time for me to give it some lovin’ and finally give it that dot com it deserves.  And so earlier today, runningpinoy.wordpress.com officially became runningpinoy.com.

Working with WordPress

WordPress is just unbelievable easy to work with that’s why I’ve never thought of changing hosts throughout this year.  Its ease of use let me focus on the content I want to write instead of the technicalities of bandwidth, storage space, security, etc.  Sure, I get frustrated at times that I can’t put ads on my blog for profit, but then again that goes back to keeping this blog non-commercialized.  In a way, it is commercialized as you may have seen a lot of Press Releases in my blog, but honestly, I don’t receive any monetary compensation from them unless stated otherwise (I personally believe that I have a moral obligation to disclose if anything posted on my blog is a paid content).  Also, if you notice some ads at the end of some of my post, those ads were placed by WordPress for them to earn some income for hosting my blog for free.  Overall, not having potential income from having my own ad service is disappointing, but all the good free service that I’m having from WordPress is a reasonable tradeoff.

Now what?

Moving forward, there’s really nothing groundbreaking to expect.  The blog is still hosted by WordPress and I still can’t run my own ads.  But now, all my posts are ad free!  If you hate ads, then this should come as a welcome.

If you notice something different but can’t quite figure out what, it must be the font.  I’m experimenting with this new serif font for the contents of the blog.  What do you think?  Does it make reading easier or do you prefer the previous font?  Let me know on the comments below.

Possibly the only “collateral damage” that I have with this domain change is that I lost the count of Facebook likes, Pinterest pins, etc. at the bottom of each post.  The old links still work and going to runningpinoy.wordpress.com correctly points you to the new runningpinoy.com address, but the counters are not smart enough to know that.  So if I post something new on social media and you find it useful, I hope to earn your thumbs up!

Finally, all about secure connections.  These are websites that use HTTPS on the left side of their address and your browser usually displays a padlock icon with it.  I’m glad that WordPress handled this automatically and you’re always diverted to the HTTPS site even if you bookmarked the old site or the unsecure HTTP site.

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To all my readers, thank you very much for the continued support all these years!  It had been a long journey and I look forward to many more years of blogging about running and everything else that goes with it.  Feel free to share your thoughts by sending your comments below and feel free to follow my other social media accounts.  Run safe everyone!