I’ve gotten a bunch of emails from people since re-launching the site under the name 512 Pixels. I thought I’d answer the most popular questions here.
So, why did you change names?
First of all, it had nothing to do with this.
It boils down to this: while I loved the name Forkbombr, I didn’t think it played well, long-term.
What about old links? Aren’t they all broken now?
Old links are fine. Thanks to the magic that is the .htaccess file and mod_rewrite commands, forkbombr.net/anything redirects to 512pixels.net/anything. Here’s the code to make that happen:
RedirectMatch permanent (.*) http://512pixels.net$1
What theme is that?
I wrote the theme for 512 Pixels based on Thematic. Thematic is basically an framework on which to hang your own CSS and PHP.
It wasn’t too much work to get where I wanted to be, thankfully. I’ve still got some kinks to iron out, but everything is rendering, which is great.
It was important to me that the new site look like the old one in some ways — hence the orange links remain. The logo was done by Wet Frog Studios.
How’d you move old posts?
That was actually very easy. WordPress makes it a breeze to import and export content. I did run into this issue, but it wasn’t a big deal to fix it with Media Temple.
It’s vital with WordPress to make sure things like permalink schemes and other settings are the same between the old and new sites, or odd things may happen.
Still no Linked-List items?
There’s no denying that linked-list items are a popular feature on blogs like Daring Fireball, Shawn Blanc.net and The Brooks Review. I know that’s it is easy to make WordPress do it. I just don’t like it.
I don’t think anyone is confused by the way I do things now. I also don’t think I’ll be changing it anytime soon.
What about RSS and Twitter?
To let the 2,500 RSS readers of this site get my content without having to re-subscribe was critical to this being a smooth move for everyone.
Thankfully, FeedBurner is awesome. I simply gave my feed the URL of the built-in, WordPress-generated feed, and like magic, everyone was good to go.
Currently, the URL for my FeedBurner feed includes ‘Forkbombr’ in it. I’m afraid to touch that.
I have FeedBurner auto-tweet links to the site’s Twitter account. I simply changed the name of the account from @forkbombr to @512px and moved on.