Note: this website used to be located on pablogracia.net

A few months ago, I found out that pablogracia.com would be made available. I had had my eyes on this domain for quite some time, and got excited. I use Interaction’s Poke agent to keep track of a lot of my personal life, and decided to task it with purchasing the domain. This was new to me, and I was initially anxious about an agent using my money.

Purchase

I gave the agent access to my Porkbun account through the Porkbun MCP, and preloaded the exact funds for a .com TLD ($11.08) onto my account. I told Poke to run daily RDAP checks to see when the domain would become available.

The old owner of the domain had it for two years and I was worried he had forgotten to renew it, and would snipe it from under me.

Every day for a month or so, the agent told me what the status of the domain was, and any IANA codes that had been added or removed, the key one being pendingDelete. This code can be used to estimate when the domain will be re-released to registrars. Verisign (the owner of .com, .net, and more) releases domains 120 hours after pendingDelete is added as a code.

The agent started making more frequent checks during the Verisign deletion window. It finally purchased the domain the second it became available. This came at a really late time for me, and I had already gone to bed. I was very glad to have the agent watching for the domain so I didn’t have to stay up.

Preparation

Kind of moving in opposite order here, I prepared for the domain transfer by refactoring static references to pablogracia.net to a Liquid templating/Jekyll config variable. The infrastructure page itself had to be refactored in order to be able to support multiple domains.

Also, I had decided by this point that I wanted to hold onto my old domain as well, thinking it would be helpful to distribute services across two different domains. I made a note to determine how I wanted to change the infrastructure.

As you can tell, the .net domain will remain for network services, backends, and stuff of the sort. The new .com domain will be used for more user-accessible services.

Migration

I set up Cloudflare HTTP 301 redirects for pablogracia.net,www.pablogracia.net, and www.pablogracia.com to pablogracia.com.

I have yet to set up Purelymail on pablogracia.com and continue to use my Cloudflare Email Forwarding/Gmail “Send Mail As” setup. I’ll do a writeup on this soon, since I think the setup is super interesting and unique.

I relocated the analytics server from g.pablogracia.net to a.pablogracia.com. This was easy, since the analytics server was setup during the initial refactor. Everything else has yet to be relocated. I’ll update this post when other services get migrated.