Over the past 12 months, a great deal of effort and planning went into making the Humbled Females website. That work wasn’t only relegated to the administrative side, however. The community itself has done its share in building what this site is today and it’s something we can all be proud of, I think. There’s still more articles to write and theory to hash out in the forums, as I suspect there always will be, but so far, so good.
One of the recurrent problems throughout the existence of the revitalization, however, was the presence of the preexisting site, humbledfemales.net, which was a reboot of the previous original effort (yes, the history is a bit confusing). An enthusiast of the original Livejournal community, back in the days of 2006, who went by the name of “Justine” acquired the domain name after it lapsed and subsequently republished the copyrighted materials from the old, original site that I owned. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that upon discovery, given that I had inevitably let the site close in 2009-2010. We got in contact and hashed out our differences. In doing so, I learned her intentions were merely to bring what was dear to her back to life, and while we didn’t fully see eye to eye on everything per se, I gave permission to republish the articles from the old site as she added new ones. As for the Livejournal community, I agreed to her co-managing the site with me, and so all was fairly well.
In late 2011, however, I decided to rebuild the original vision of Humbled Females. Why? I felt the community needed direction again, especially in light of the Livejournal’s stagnation and the fact that the new domain owner and I didn’t quite see eye to eye on everything. Since I didn’t own the .com domain name, I purchased the .net and .org domains instead, and, voila: the site we have today was born. All along, however, I had been attempting to convince the .com’s owner, “Justine,” to merge our domains together. Because of our mildly conflicting visions, it has not always been the easiest of dialogs between us.
But today I’m happy to announce that the confusing rivalry of the two Humbled Females websites haunts the Internet no longer. In a pleasing turn of events, Justine gracefully decided to give in to my call for unification. As of today, Humbled Females spans the three major domain extensions: .com, .net, and .org.
What this means
The reacquisition of the .com domain extension, along with established copyright and trademark protection, carves out a much stronger and more stable presence online for Humbled Females. Our visibility in search engine results will increase markedly, meaning we’ll be a little easier to find on major search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, Dogpile, Mahalo, and DuckDuckGo. That means more sign-ups and more support for the site. Most importantly of all, however, it means we now speak with one voice. And that’s a very good thing.
I’d like to take this opportunity to publicly thank Justine, the previous owner/manager of the .com domain from 2010-2012, for her help in unifying the domains. Her cooperation in bringing our sites together was critical, and so my personal appreciation runs high for her in doing so.
Happy Holidays to you all and I hope to see more growth and continued good news for Humbled Females in 2013!
