My flight of fancy with the domain and blog name “Codaname” is no more. What once was my code and audio blog with a haphazard idea to merge a musical term (“coda”) and some kind of spy reference (“codename”) is now gone…

…and is now just part of my main site, MichaelChadwick.Info!

Over the years, I’ve struggled to figure out how to market myself online. Personal homepages and websites have come and gone, an outlet for me to try out whatever new framework or tool I was interested in at the time. Having (and hosting) a website that says “here is where I live on the Internet” still feels valuable in this day and age where every company wants you to put all your content in their databases instead.

I’ve had a passion for coding about as long as my passion for music, and my attempts at said Portal o’ Me usually reflected those dual interests. At some point, I decided to just catalogue ALL of my music, and that became its own Drupal site. My blogging efforts, originally born in ye olde LiveJournal, got moved to Wordpress and lived there for a long time. However, my geeky interests expanded to more than just those two things, and I still wanted a one stop shop to see everything without visiting multiple sites.

The website at https://codana.me aimed to be that place at one point. It’s always hard to come up with names, and I thought I’d found a clever one (at one of those clever short TLDs that finished the name), so I registered it. It was built with Jekyll and was my first attempt at using a Static Site Builder. In the end, it contained all my past blogs (and many new ones beyond that), an About page (with a few extra internal pages about my music studio and audio plugins), and a list of projects I’d worked on.

I realized at some point that I wanted a public-facing, my-actual-name-harnessing digital business card of sorts. Codaname was great for reading up on what I was doing, but its identity was more abstract, not having my name in the title. It also was not a one-pager, which I really wanted. Thus, https://michaelchadwick.info¹ was born, and its been the go-to URL for any profile needing a website from me.

As has occurred in the past, the feeling that I need to pare down my digital properties reared its head again. Keeping up multiple sites feels like work I’d rather not do, and so I took the Jekyll generator part of Codaname, shoved it into MichaelChadwick.Info, and then merged the blog and some other content, shedding the rest of it completely. The result is that MC.Info is now a Jekyll site, with the blog being a sub-function. The one-pager homepage is still the main point, but I can now handle all the blog stuff alongside the business card stuff.

I’m not as enamored with the longer domain name, and I’m already thinking about a new nom de plume to operate as that’ll just redirect here, but for now I’m happy.