tl;dr: I’m renaming my blog and closing down my Substack newsletter.
Changing a website name is easy, but doing a whole new banner is hard. So I elected to keep the old banner and just change the text of the (fake) license plate. (Click for a higher resolution version.).
Bloggers can write articles for their blogs, or they can fiddle about with the technical underpinnings of the blog itself—with the latter often serving as a substitute for the former. So it is with me: the writing I’ve been doing is not writing that will show up on this blog any time soon (or perhaps ever), so instead I’m doing something I’ve thought about doing for a while, namely renaming the website to use my own name and domain.
My reasons for doing this are pretty straightforward. My goal as a blogger remains to write in a way that upholds the ideals of civility and truth: civility to all, including those with whom I might disagree, and the truth as I can best determine it, even when it’s not to my liking. However in these polarized times actually putting the words “civility” and “truth” in a website name invites mild skepticism at best and cynical sneers at worst.
I could rename the website to something more stirring and of the moment, as for example the Howard County Library System did when they “sunset” their “choose civility” campaign and rebranded under the more pugnacious slogan “brave voices, brave choices.”
But in the end I concluded that it would be better just to use my personal domain frankhecker.com that I already use for my email address. The zeitgeist might change, but I’ll be “Frank Hecker” as long as I’m here to write.
If you’ve bookmarked old articles or linked to them, rest assured: URLs referencing the old domain name civilityandtruth.com will still work fine, and your browser will be redirected to the same place on the renamed site. (Incidentally, my ability to implement this is one of the advantages of maintaining my own platform rather than relying on someone else’s.)
Finally, as part of this renaming I’ve also decided to suspend my newsletter at civilityandtruth.substack.com. I never used that newsletter for its stated purpose, namely sending out alerts of new articles on my main blog, and the articles I posted there were things I could have just as well as posted here. So I thought it best to consolidate my online writing to a single website, one that I control (see above).
If you want to get notified of new articles you can either follow me on Twitter (@hecker) or use a news reader and point it to this site’s RSS feed (https://frankhecker.com/feed.xml). (If you already have a news reader pointing to this site, it should continue to work. However you may want to resubscribe using the new URL.)
Thanks to all of you who come to this site from time to time. I’m sorry there hasn’t been much for you to read here lately, and hope I’ll be able to remedy that in future.