Renaming the Front Matter Blog

Yesterday I renamed the Front Matter blog to blog.front-matter.de, i.e. changing the top-level domain from .io to .de.

I did this for two reasons:

• The internet country code top-level domain .io has a complicated history, and I wanted to migrate away from it for some time.
• The Domain registrar and name servers for front-matter.de are now located in Germany instead of the United States (front-matter.io name servers are with digitalocean.com, and the domain is registered with godaddy.com).

This transition will take some time, and the front-matter.io domain will continue to work during the transition. The DOIs of the Front Matter blog posts have been updated, so using the DOI to link to a blog post should not make a difference.

When I made the switch yesterday, the Cloudflare network services experienced a major outage, affecting a big part of the internet, including DOI resolution. This has been resolved, but it was a reminder that Internet infrastructure is increasingly dependent on a few major players, with associated risks.