If you're reading this, you're likely already on our new site, StageSelectStart.com.
Yesterday, while listening to My Brother, My Brother, and Me, during the ad break, Justin McElroy was lamenting the inability to quickly register a new domain name, and that got me thinking about our own Blogger site. Last November, I had looked into designing a webpage using Squarespace, a favorite ad for a lot of podcasts I apparently listen to, and while I found that StageSelectStart.com was available, I wasn't able to find out how easy/hard it would be to have the website function the same as Blogger, since that's pretty much what we do here. I kept coming back to the thought that, "If Blogger's working the way we want it to, why should I pay a monthly fee to do the exact same thing?" Frictional Games was still using Blogger as their primary website through, at least, the release of A Machine for Pigs, so it must not be that bad. But during this ad break, I thought about StageSelectStart.com again and decided to look it up, slightly afraid that the site had been snatched up by some algorithm that scours the Internet for Squarespace pages that people have let lapse and buy them up in hopes of a windfall on the resale market.
Well, that didn't happen. In multiple ways.
StageSelectStart.com had not been snatched up by someone else, and I ended up not using Squarespace to set up this Forbes-quality website. Earlier last week, I had listened to an episode of The Daily, where host Natalie Kitroeff interviewed Kevin Roose, and during the interview, she created a website for her using Claude Code, essentially an AI chatbot. Having some success using Google's AI Gemini, I decided to use it as a form of tech support. I first confirmed that I could purchase the stageselectstart.com URL and have our stageselectstart.blogspot.com essentially be loaded at the new URL, rather than trying to recreate a webpage from scratch (since I wasn't using Squarespace). After making this confirmation, I purchased the URL and began the process of linking the two accounts.
There were several times I regretted not going the easier route with Squarespace, or some other website development/hosting platform, as I ran into issue after issue trying to connect Blogger to our new webhost. Using Gemini, I read through some descriptions about managing DNS information, updating NS and CNAME information in the hosting's account page with data from Blogger to verify that I was in fact the owner of stageselectstart.com. After going through the process, I found a button/link on the account page that actually would do that step and additional steps for me after entering the verifying information from Blogger, but then I had conflicting and duplicate entries. This is where Gemini came in and was helpful because I was able to upload a screenshot of my account settings, and the chatbot told me specifically what I needed to keep and what I needed to delete. I know there was a lot of jargon that went over my head.
After anxiously deleting a couple of duplicate NS and CNAME entries, confirming with Gemini that that was what I was supposed to do, and after another screen shot analyzed, I was told that everything looked good and that the webpage should be live after anywhere between 15 minutes and 48 hours. An hour later, the webpage couldn't load, so I was prompted to check on my phone while not connected to WiFi, and only then was I able to pull up stageselectstart.com by going to stageselectstart.blogspot.com. That feeling of relief that I hadn't accidentally deleted something with A records, MX records, additional CNAMEs, or other things that I had no knowledge of before this morning. And that the CAA was functioning. Can't forget that one.
So the whole point of this is to reassure you that you are supposed to be here, at stageselectstart.com, even though you likely entered stageselectstart.blogspot.com, and that nothing will change here in the way we do things. Thanks for visiting and/or thanks for staying.
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