I changed the blog domain to notes.rewheel.dev

I changed this blog's domain from notes.rasshii.dev to notes.rewheel.dev. I also renamed the site from "Tech Notes" to "Reinvent Notes", with the tagline "Learn by reinventing the wheel."

Every time I change a domain, I forget "why did I change it again?" and "why did I pick this name again?", so I am recording the path to the decision and my review process. I would be glad if it helps anyone who is thinking "I want to change my personal blog's domain too."

What I disliked about the old notes.rasshii.dev

rasshii.dev is an apex domain taken from my GitHub / X handle, and I ran the tech blog on the subdomain notes.rasshii.dev. After running it for about a month, a few things bothered me.

• Dependence on a personal handle: When the blog's concept is tied to a handle name, it becomes hard to change the site's direction.
• No clear purpose for the apex: I planned to use rasshii.dev itself as a portfolio, but "personal handle = portfolio" makes it hard to stand out.
• No meaning conveyed to readers: Seeing rasshii.dev for the first time tells you nothing about the site's content.

In short, I started to feel that I wanted the blog's identity to be independent from my handle.

Start from the concept

When thinking about a domain name, it is better to start from "what is the core concept of the site?" rather than immediately lining up candidates.

What I want to do on this blog is, in short, "deepen my understanding by rebuilding or re-organizing existing tools and concepts myself." My recent post Introduction to Harness Engineering is exactly that: it reconstructs, in my own words, the harness engineering concept proposed by Anthropic, Hashimoto, and others, together with my own ~/.claude/ configuration examples.

The English phrase that fits this pattern perfectly is "reinventing the wheel." It is originally a negative idiom meaning "needlessly rebuilding something that already exists," but in an age where AI agents will build anything for you, the act of "deliberately rebuilding something yourself to understand it" carries learning value. With that framing, I thought I could flip this ironic phrase into something positive.

Listing domain candidates

Using "reinventing the wheel" as the theme, I came up with some candidates.

Candidate	Category	Comment
reinventingthewheel.com	Full	Faithful to the original phrase, but 24 characters and easy to mistype in Slack
reinvent.dev	Shortened (existing word)	Strong; reinvent works on its own
rewheel.dev	Coined word	7 characters, short and memorable, meaning inferable from re + wheel
wheelnotes.dev	Compound coinage	Affinity with the tech-notes repo name, a notes feel
wheellab.dev	Compound coinage	"Wheel laboratory," with a trial-and-error nuance
whyreinvent.com	Inverted question	"Why reinvent?", a bolder tone

Considering SEO

At first I thought "I don't care about SEO, so anything is fine," but I looked into it just in case. My conclusion is that in modern SEO, coined words tend to have the advantage.

Problems with existing-phrase domains (like reinventingthewheel.com)

• Exact Match Domain penalty: In 2012, Google introduced a change that lowers the ranking of "sites that stuff a keyword into the whole domain." If the content quality is low, it can backfire.
• Heavy search competition: "reinventing the wheel" is a common idiom, so ranking at the top is hard.
• Hard to remember / misspelling risk: Long phrases are easy to mistype when shared.

Strengths of coined words (like rewheel.dev)

• Strong for brand search: It is easy to rank at the top when someone searches "rewheel."
• Little competition: If there is no identical domain name, SEO competition is unlikely to occur.
• Short and easy to share: At 7 characters, the risk of mistyping over voice or in Slack is low.
• Precedents from big players: Google / Spotify / Vercel：all coined words or unique spellings.

"Owning the brand search" is a stronger weapon than I expected. Modern SEO has a structure of "compete on content + attract traffic with the brand." A coined-word domain accelerates both.

I ended up choosing rewheel.dev

From the candidates, I chose rewheel.dev. The deciding factors were:

1. Short, at 7 characters: The shortest to convey over Slack or by voice
2. A coined word whose meaning is inferable: re + wheel conveys the concept of "the wheel, again"
3. Zero SEO competition: I can own the brand search
4. The .dev TLD: A developer-focused TLD operated by Google, clean and HTTPS-only
5. Easy to pronounce: It reads straight off as "rewheel"

Why I went with a subdomain

After acquiring rewheel.dev via Vercel Domains, I initially published this blog on the apex (rewheel.dev). But I soon switched to a subdomain (notes.rewheel.dev). The reasons:

• Reserving the apex for future use: If I later want to use the rewheel.dev apex for a portfolio / landing page / another site, it is easy to switch.
• Consistency with the past pattern: It has the same notes.<brand>.<tld> shape as the old notes.rasshii.dev, so the URL pattern feels natural to readers too.
• Extensibility: In the future I can add subsites like blog.rewheel.dev / lab.rewheel.dev / api.rewheel.dev.

It is the same lesson I learned when acquiring rasshii.dev: the apex cannot be casually repurposed, so leave it untouched until its purpose is clearly decided. That has become my personal rule of thumb.

Refreshing the site name, tagline, and homepage description

If you are going to change the domain, it is more consistent to align the site name and tagline as well.

Item	Before	After
Site name	Tech Notes	Reinvent Notes
Tagline	Personal technical writing	Learn by reinventing the wheel
Description	A personal tech site recording frontend, backend, infrastructure, AI, learning logs, and more.	People say reinventing the wheel is a waste, but rebuilding things on purpose lets you understand how they work at a deeper level. This is a personal tech notebook recording what I learn while reinventing frontend, backend, infrastructure, AI, and more.

At first I considered making the site name the URL itself (notes.rewheel.dev). Unifying brand and URL to aid memorability is a pattern you often see on product-oriented sites like Vercel or Linear. But once I placed it in the navbar, I realized the concept (learning by reinventing the wheel) does not come across to first-time visitors. So I settled on "Reinvent Notes," which conveys the meaning more directly. It is a structure that combines three elements — re- (again) + invent + notes — so even people who do not know the domain can grasp the nature of the site at a glance.

What happens to the old domain (notes.rasshii.dev)?

For now I will keep it without deleting it (about 1-2 weeks). The reasons:

• URLs of people who have bookmarked it will not die instantly
• Old URLs shared on Slack or Twitter keep working for a while
• If a problem appears on the new domain, I can fall back to the old URL

From an SEO standpoint, setting up a "301 redirect from the old URL to the new URL" is the standard move, but since this blog does not have SEO as its main goal, I went with simply serving both in parallel. Once the new domain is stable, I plan to delete the old one.

Wrap-up

Changing a domain is mundane work, but it was an interesting experience as a process of compressing the site's identity into a single word. Like technology selection, building the habit of lining up multiple candidates and weighing the trade-offs lets you reconstruct the reasoning behind a decision when you look back later.

• Old URL: https://notes.rasshii.dev (runs in parallel for a while)
• New URL: https://notes.rewheel.dev

If you have bookmarked it, I would be glad if you could switch to the new URL when you have time. I will keep recording my journey of "learning by reinventing the wheel."