When will this blog move out of Blogger onto the independent website at althou.se?

You may be wondering. We're ready to go except for the project of uploading all the old posts and comments onto the new Althouse. (The blog will still be called Althouse. It's just the URL that's changing to althou.se — instead of althouse.blogspot.com.)

Here's what's taking some time. I'm not just starting on a new site and leaving the old posts and comments back here. It will all be over there (and the old stuff will remain here too).  The Althouse blog will remain a single, unified opus at the new site. You'll be able to search, click on tags, and browse the archive and get everything all the way back to January 14, 2004, the day this blog began.

At this point in the process of exporting the blog, the great people who are doing all the technical work for me have done nearly all the posts, but there are a whole lot more comments to go. They've exported 23,549 out of 23,599 post, but only 15,262 out of 989,369 comments. It's a big deal to move that much stuff, but moving it all is important to me. Not just the posts, but also the comments. We could go to the new blog much more quickly if I exported only the posts, and preserved the posts with the comments Blogger site, but I don't want that. There are tons of wonderful comments, and they're all coming with me to "Sweden." I'm not going without them. Which means we can't go live until next week.

Isn't it cool that there are nearly 1 million comments on this blog? I wonder what the best comment of all time. The most momentous one for me is: "Meade, this is HUGE! Meade....?" (Explained here.)

I think I will be able to identify the millionth comment, by the way, so keep commenting.

Let's talk about URLs, specifically: althou.se

As you may have figured out by now, especially if you hang out in the comments here, I'm working on moving this blog out of Blogger. My recent troubles with Blogger/Google, which are still not completely solved — old posts are still missing their comments — pushed me to do what I probably should have done long ago.

One thing we've had to do is pick a URL. The obvious choices, althouse.com and annalthouse.com, are not available. Whoever owns them is demanding a ridiculous amount of money — $33,500 and $888, respectively (with no mechanism for making a counteroffer). I don't know what is going on there, but if the point is to squat and then sell, shouldn't you make the price something within reason? I don't accept switching the .com to .net for either "althouse" or "annalthouse," because I think people would accidentally go to the .com, and who knows what horrible things someone might put there. In any case, I don't want to drive traffic to those bastards, whoever they are.

So the predicament of the unavailability of the obvious forced us to brainstorm. When I IM'd my son John about it, he immediately suggested althou.se. I didn't even know what the .se meant. Well, it means Sweden. But who cares? There's no embarrassing association with Sweden that concerns me. There's the issue of giving the false impression of being Swedish, but that's a very retro concern, I think. (Am I wrong?) The hip approach — am I right? — is to look at all those country codes as a source of letter combinations to form short, spiffy URLs like althou.se.

Discuss!

ADDED: In the comments, there's a lot of fretting about using .se, but check this out:

Following in Twitter (T.co) and Overstock’s (O.co’s) footsteps, Amazon has picked up the domains A.Co, Z.Co, K.Co and interestingly enough Cloud.co in a deal made with Colombia-based domain registry .Co.

While .Co originally gave Twitter the T.Co domain name for free in order to spread awareness about the brand, Amazon has actually purchased these from .Co for an undisclosed price. In comparison, Overstock’s O.Co rebranding was the first negotiated .Co purchase deal, for $350K...

The genesis of the .Co domain is through Colombia, and while country codes usually take a hit in Google rankings, .Co is part of a unique set of cclds (.tv .me .co) which are treated like gtlds or generic domains like .com .net .org.

.Co is about to hit its 1 millionth domain registered in little under a year of service (.com is at over a hundred million) and is about to set up a stable pricing plan for one letter and two letter domains....

A.Co,  Z.Co, and K.Co will probably be used for Amazon, Zappos, and Kindle. But, anyway. You see my point. The country-based top-level domains — I'm told "country codes" isn't the right term — are being used now for their letters. This is the trend. I'm on trend, people.

A masculine tear makes a nation gasp.

The man is Danial Westling, who married Sweden's Princess Victoria of Sweden today.

Heating with bunnies.

In Sweden.

"Bird-chasing guards rip palace painting with bamboo sticks."

"In their attempts to apprehend the flying fugitive, the guards ripped a hole in Fredric Westin's 1838 portrait of Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, who reigned as King Karl XIV of Sweden February 5, 1818 until his death on March 8, 1844."

When robots attack.

Good luck suing in Sweden.

In 2007, a muscular robot programmed to lift heavy stones malfunctioned in a factory near Stockholm, Sweden, and some poor devil—who thought he'd turned off the power—nearly got himself killed when the robot grabbed his head and shook him around. He ended up with four broken ribs, but managed to "defend himself" and live. The judge awarded the guy 25,000 Swedish kronor, which sounds nice except that it's only about $3,000. The judge also reprimanded the guy for being at least partially at fault, if I'm reading the Swedish translation correctly.

Get robot insurance: