a name of your own

your site lives at you.bimb.ooo and always will. but if you already own a domain, you can point it here and your site answers there too.

both addresses work. the one you were given does not go away, does not redirect, and does not change, so nothing anybody already bookmarked, linked or subscribed to breaks, whatever you do with the new name later.

how

in your corner there is a box for a name. type just the name: wren.example, no http, no slash.

nothing happens to it yet. we give you a line to add to that domain's dns:

_bimbooo-challenge.wren.example   TXT   bimbooo-site-verification=...

add it wherever you manage that domain, then come back and press check it. dns takes a while to travel (sometimes minutes, occasionally hours), so if it is not found the first time, that is normal and worth another go later. the string never changes, so you can close the tab and come back next week to the same one.

once it is found, point the name at us as well: an A record (or AAAA) for wren.example aimed at the same place bimb.ooo is.

the certificate is the last thing to arrive and it needs that record to already be pointing here, so the order matters: prove the name, point it at us, then give it a few minutes. if you visit before the certificate is ready your browser will complain, which is alarming and temporary.

you can hold three names at once.

what happens after

nothing, mostly, which is the idea. your pages answer at both addresses, the read-once ones still burn, and your feed still works.

your feed is worth one note. the id on each item stays on your bimb.ooo address for good, even when the feed is read from your own name. that is not an oversight: a reader uses that id to know it has seen something already, so if it ever changed, everybody following you would be handed your whole feed again as if it were all new. the links in the feed do follow whichever address it was read from.

if the record goes away

we look at each name now and then and write down what we found, and that is all we do with it. we do not take a site down because a nameserver was quiet one afternoon. that happens all the time, and a site that unpublishes itself over a hiccup is a worse problem than one that stays up.

so a name keeps working until you let it go here, or until the keeper revokes it. if you stop pointing the domain at us, the certificate simply expires on its own after a few months.

letting one go

let it go in your corner, and we stop answering for it. your bimb.ooo address is unaffected, as it was the whole time.

bimb.ooo · the manual · publishing · sites · links · account · domains · what changed · about · QAF