You Might Notice A Small Change To The Site

Posted on Saturday, March 22, 2008 by MegaZone

Notice anything different about the site today?

Yes, the name of the site has changed. TiVo Lovers is now Gizmo Lovers, with the corresponding URL change to http://www.gizmolovers.com/. Don’t worry, the old URL and all the old links should still work, they’ll redirect to the new URL. I have TiVoLovers.com registered through December 3, 2016 (and GizmoLovers.com through January 17, 2018), so it should last quite a while. (And I may well keep the domains renewed beyond that point.)

There is one issue – there is no simple way to change the FeedBurner feed’s name and redirect the old one. I thought I’d be able to setup two feeds with the same content – the old and the new. But when I tried that, FeedBurner proved to be too ‘smart’. It noticed the two feeds had the same source and kept giving me conflict errors. In the end I switched the old feed, http://feeds.feedburner.com/tivolovers, to carry only the site updates, and the new feed, http://feeds.feedburner.com/gizmolovers is now the full feed. So if you have an RSS reader subscribed to http://feeds.feedburner.com/tivolovers you’ll see this (as it is filed under Site Updates), but not the majority of posts. You need to unsubscribe and re-subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/gizmolovers – I’m sorry for the trouble. If you’re subscribed to http://www.tivolovers.com/feed/ you needn’t do anything, that has been mapped to the new feed and you should automatically get it. Though you might want to switch to http://www.gizmolovers.com/feed/ just in case the old domain stops working someday.

Why the name change? There are several reasons:

  • Since the first day I setup the blog the name hasn’t really represented the content of the site, which goes far beyond just TiVo. That’s bothered me for a while.
  • As the site has grown I’ve become increasingly conscious of the fact that I’m using TiVo’s trademark. While they haven’t asked me to stop, they could at any time and would certainly be within their rights to do so. I’d rather do so myself now rather than be forced to do so unplanned at some point.
  • The name itself, ‘TiVo Lovers’, implied a bias to the site. That increasingly bothered me, as it made it easy for people discount the content as biased. It was also an issue when talking to other vendors. For example, when I talked to Digeo’s COO they brought up the name of the site and were concerned about fair coverage. And I certainly understood their concern. Even TiVo had some concerns when I did my Series3 review. They weren’t sure having me as a reviewer would be taken seriously because of the name of the site. Gizmo Lovers is a vendor-neutral name, which should help allay the bias issue.
  • The site has been doing fairly well, and it is being taken more seriously by vendors that I talk to. I was somewhat surprised to have vendors recognize the site when I mentioned it to them, such as at the Blu-ray Disc Association booth during CES. Those discussions made me realize the name was a bit of an issue. And also that I might want to do things like get business cards made to hand out to promote the site and make more contacts – which brings me back to using TiVo’s name and their logo. I wouldn’t feel right using them on a card, even if TiVo didn’t object. And I think this will become more of an issue over time.

So, basically, I felt growing unease about violating TiVo’s trademark on their name and logo, and I increasingly felt that the name was limiting the options for growing and improving the site. Selecting a new name wasn’t easy, Gizmo Lovers was one of several names considered. But most of the domain names were taken, and I felt it was important to have the .com domain to go with the name. In the end Gizmo Lovers was the leading candidate – the domain as available, I liked the tone it implies, and having a similar cadence to the old name was a nice bonus for the transition.

Speaking of the logo, the site is going to need a new one. And I’m absolutely hopeless with graphics. So I’m going to be holding a contest for a new one, that’ll be another post.

I think I’ve managed to fix all of the internal links on the site, but if you noticed anything still pointing to the old URL, or any other troubles, please let me know.

Thank you.

About MegaZone

MegaZone is the Editor of Gizmo Lovers and the chief contributor. He's been online since 1989 and active in several generations of 'social media' - mailing lists, USENet groups, web forums, and since 2003, blogging.    MegaZone has a presence on several social platforms: Google+ / Facebook / Twitter / LinkedIn / LiveJournal / Web.    You can also follow Gizmo Lovers on other sites: Blog / Google+ / Facebook / Twitter.
This entry was posted in Site Updates and tagged . Bookmark the permalink.
  • http://mark_tv.livejournal.com/ MHA

    Looks like tivolovers_blog on LiveJournal will be fine as long as the old domain keeps working. But your Captcha text is still unreadable. :-P

  • Dan

    Ok with the new name.
    Don’t like the colors.

  • http://www.gizmolovers.com/ MegaZone

    MHA – Yeah, it should keep working for now. Emailing LJ to have them re-point the feed is on my list of things to do, but not a high priority. I’m still cleaning up other odds and ends. As for the Captcha – yeah, sometimes I get one I just can’t read. You can reload it (the top button of the three next to the box) to get another one until you get one readable. I find one reload usually does it. Or there is the audio version (the second button). I tried a few CAPTCHA plug-ins and this was actually the best, IMHO. And I like that it helps OCR texts at the same time.

    Dan – I was waiting for that. :-) I used to get complaints that the old colors (which were the four colors of the TiVo logo) were too ‘dull’ or ‘washed out’, and that I should do something ‘brighter’ or ‘higher contrast’ to make it easier to read. So the new scheme is kind of ‘ANSI mode terminal’. I do think the new green is easier to read as it is a lot brighter against the black than the TiVo green was. The red is almost the same. Yellow seems to be OK, and isn’t used a lot anyway. The blue I’m on the fence about, it may be too bright.

    On my list of things to do is to give people the ability to switch to different color schemes. I have that worked out, I just need to find the time to do it.

  • Robm

    That was a great idea changing the site name, Megazone. I often had passing moments when I wondered if Tivo minded the similiarity between your website name and their copy right. But since I love reading your blogs, I didn’t want to critize. But now that you acknowledged it, I’m comfortable saing that I’m glad you did change the name.

  • MickeS

    For a long time I’ve been thinking you needed to change the name since 1) you’ve written a lot about non-TiVo matters and 2) you’ve not expressed enough love for TiVo. :D

    The new name is good. The new color scheme is not. ;)

  • James

    Text colors are a bit hard to deal with

  • Robert Biro

    With a personal handle like MegaZone, why not make that the site name?
    There is already Gizmodo, so Gizmo is kind of taken.

  • http://www.gizmolovers.com/ MegaZone

    Robert,

    Well, megazone.com has been taken by squatters for years now. I know, I keep checking on it. I actually missed it by a couple of weeks way back around 1996. (The current whois says created in 1998, but that’s wrong, it actually changed hands between squatters.) I spent too long thinking about it, and when I went to register it it had just been grabbed. I’ve asked a few times about buying it, but the lowest asking price has been $5,000. Like I have that kind of money. So megazone.org has been my personal domain since 1996 – and I don’t want to use that for this site.

    I also really didn’t want to make it too much about ‘me’. I did think up a few plays on my name, using ‘mega’ or ‘zone’ – like techzone, technozone, megadget (WAY too close to Engadget I felt). But all of those domain names were either taken, or I felt the name was either too lame or too forced (or both). Basically all the ones I liked were taken.

    Plus I’ve talked to a couple of people about being guest bloggers, and if I add more bloggers to the site on a (semi-)regular basis, I’d feel weird about it being fronted by my name. I’ve talked to Dave Zatz about blogging a few times, and we got to sit down for a bit at CES, and he’s had similar concerns over ‘Zatz Not Funny’ now that he has Mari & Brent contributing regularly. Our conversations certainly fed into my thought process on the name selection.

    Gizmo Lovers was arrived at basically though process of elimination – and most of the candidates that were eliminated were due to the domain being taken. I felt it was important to have the most obvious version of the domain for the site. If I have to explain it (oh, it has a hyphen, or a weird spelling, etc) then it isn’t as effective. Being able to say “I’m with ‘site-name’” and have someone remember the name and be able to go right to it from a browser was an important criteria – and that also pretty much dictated a .com domain.

    I didn’t feel that ‘Gizmo Lovers’ was too close to ‘Gizmodo’ – and the truth is there are really only so many words to describe the genre, as it were: gizmo, gadget, tech[no], and gear, pretty much. And there are lots of tech sites using combinations thereof. (I’m kind of surprised Gizmotaku isn’t taken – though I bet it is soon now that I said that. I don’t want it – I do not consider myself ‘otaku’.) It isn’t like I tried ‘Gizmondo’. ;-)

    Gizmo Lovers wasn’t my first choice, but it ended up being the best name that wasn’t eliminated, and I’m not unhappy with it. I think the similarity to the old name could help ease the transition as well, less confusion.

  • MichaelM

    Great…..love the name. Hate the colors. Reading green on black may work for your eyes and your screen, but it’s murder for me. Either provide options for users or become more color-neutral. You can’t be winning too many new readers with this combination.