Jason J. Gullickson

Jason J. Gullickson

Human-readable blog names

For those of you who find names like “098dbd12ffcc1e87bf166d68e02cb51e” hard to remember, we’ve added a little feature that will give your blog a slightly easier to memorize name.  These names cannot be changed (if you’d like a technical explanation as to why, read on below), but at some point in the future we’ll offer personalized blog URL’s via support for custom domains.

In the meantime, every Preposterous blog gets an awesome machine-generated human-readable name, enjoy!

The reason this name can’t be changed is that it is actually derived from the email address  associated with the blog (don’t worry, it can’t be reverse- engineered in any practical sense).

As you know, Preposterous blogs are tied to the email address that you use to submit posts.  Since displaying your email address to the world is not the nicest thing to do, we generate a hash of your email address and use that as the publicly-visible address for your blog.  This works great, but these hashes are hardly memorable, so we use another algorithm that takes the hash for input and generates (more) human-readable names.

Since these names are ultimately derived from your email address, they can’t be altered “at will”, and the only practical way to change them is to change the email address used for the blog.  As mentioned above, down the road we plan to offer a “custom domain” option that will let users point their own domain name at a Preposterous blog which will bypass these generated names altogether.