Go Ahead, Change Your Journal's Address

Hi folks -- so, Journaler NJmom72 e-mailed me a question last week; she wanted to know: What would happen if she changed her Journal's Web address (or URL) to match the new title of her blog -- would it break people's bookmarks or Favorite Places if people went to the old address?

I'm happy to say that the answer is: No, changing your Journal's Web address won't break people's bookmarks. Read on.

When you first create your Journal, your Journal's address is determined this way:
journals.aol.com/[YourScreenName]/[TheNameofYourJournal]

In terms of Journal addresses, Your Screen Name is what it is; you can't change it. The Name of Your Journal is what you typed when you were first creating your blog, trimmed down to 32 characters and with the spaces and funny characters stripped out.

If you like, you can change the name of your Journal and you can also change the name part of your Journal's address. It's easy, and when you change your Journal's address, it will automatically redirect people going from your old address to your new one.

Here's how you change your address:

* When you're signed in to your Journal, click the blue "Edit Journal" button near the top of your blog.

* In the first section, click the link that says "Edit journal name, description and address."

* In the section marked Address (URL), you can change the name part of your address (the bit circled in red):

That's it. For example, NJMom72's previous Journal address was http://journals.aol.com/njmom72/InMyLife/ -- it's now http://journals.aol.com/njmom72/TheStrawberryPatch.

Clicking either the old address or the new address will take you to the same place.

[Added: If, after you've changed your Journal's address, someone clicks on a direct link to an entry (such as one in your archives), they will not automatically redirect to the new address of the entry. Instead, direct links to entries will be redirected to the main page of your Journal.]

Changing the URL shouldn't affect Alerts, and feed readers should be smart enough to pick up the change. Of course, you probably don't want to continually change your blog's address, since that could be kind of confusing, but it's there if you need it.

Thanks. -- Joe


p.s. The automatic name-change redirect confused me for a while when it came to the case-sensitivity of Journals addresses. The title part of Journals addresses is case-sensitive, which means that the capitalization matters.

For example, http://journals.aol.com/johnmscalzi/bytheway is blogger John's correct address; http://journals.aol.com/johnmscalzi/ByTheWay won't work (note the incorrect capitalization of B, T and W).

When I first created my blog, the title part of my address was MagicSmoke, but I changed it immediately after to all-lowercase to make things easier.

I didn't know about the automatic redirect, and it took me a long time to figure out why my blog address didn't appear to be case-sensitive, since both http://journals.aol.com/journalseditor/magicsmoke/ and http://journals.aol.com/journalseditor/MagicSmoke/ worked.

It was the redirect at work, of course, but I didn't know that at the time, so I couldn't figure out why my blog seemed to work differently from everyone else's...

Tags: aol journals tips