The Firehouse

It was about time to get a professionally-designed theme for my blog. Thanks to James Kendall, whose services I strongly recommend to anyone looking for a theme design, I have the blog I really wanted all along. He provides a fast service, will help you install the theme, and will work with you if there are any small details that need tweaking after you launch your new theme.

Uh? Armenia?

It all started with the search for a nice short domain on which to host my personal blog, which I started in May 2006. Since pretty much all short and decent .com domains are taken, and by chance stumbling upon GoDaddy’s Armenian domain registration service, I though ‘tech.am’ would be a catchy name for a tech blog. This was true at the time, but made the blog lean strongly towards the tech side, leaving my firefighting interests on a second level, where some posts would look out of place in the midst of hardware dissections and software rants.

Last year, GoDaddy stopped offering .am domain registrations, and when renewal time came up, tech.am spent about a week in a limbo, where even they weren’t sure how the renewal could be done. It seems email is not read in Armenia, and my attempts to transfer registrar were totally fruitless. Thus, one of the reasons to move to a .se domain is that Sweden is likely to provide better support for registrants, and I would be spared of the nerve-wrecking renewal time once a year (and no, you could not renew .am for more than a year at a time!).

Off to Sweden!

The tech.am domain has been redirected to the.firehou.se, so please update your feeds to point to the new domain, as I will post everything here from now on.

The new theme

When I first contacted James, I offered a few basic guidelines. The theme should be clean and polished, combine both a tech and a firefighting look, and most importantly, allow me to group posts into two categories, tech and firefighting, with a different look & feel to posts in each category. As you can see, posts in the tech category have a small computer icon and the text is blue, while posts in the firefighting category have a flame icon and the text is read. Feel free to chime in and comment on the design!