Changing my name, changing my domain.
Turns out I was mostly string literals.
I got married. Lubben became Renggli. I owned anja-luebben.ch, with a portfolio on it, a trip planner on a subdomain, an email address and a decent number of links out in the world.
I also owned anja-renggli.ch, which had been sitting there doing absolutely nothing, waiting for this exact moment like a smug little investment.
The technical part is just a list
Add the new domain to the host. Add the DNS records, which at this point I could genuinely do in my sleep: A record with the field left empty for the root, TXT record for verification, CNAME for www. Wait. Set as primary.
Then the bits that are easy to forget, because they live in the code rather than in a settings panel with a nice green tick:
The name, everywhere it's hardcoded in components.
The email address, everywhere it's hardcoded.
llms.txt, which describes me to language models.
sitemap.xml, every URL in it.
robots.txt, the sitemap line.
The JSON-LD Person schema. Name, email, url.
The og:url meta tag.
Plus a new email address on the new domain and a forward from the old one, so nothing quietly disappears into a mailbox nobody is reading.
Two minutes each. Together they're the difference between a migration and a half-migration that haunts you in six months.
The part that isn't a list
The old domain stays live. Every link anyone ever shared points there. Every business card I handed out this year. Every profile field I filled in once and never looked at again. It redirects, permanently, which passes along whatever that domain had built up.
But for a while I'm two people in public. anja-luebben.ch in the old links. anja-renggli.ch on everything new. LinkedIn somewhere in between. Search engines and AI systems both holding an older picture of me than the one I'm currently shipping.
There's no clean cut-over for that. You change what you control, redirect the rest, and live with a stretch where both names are true.
What actually surprised me
How much of my identity was sitting in string literals.
My name was in components. In structured data. In a text file written for machines. In meta tags. In an email address. In a domain. None of it dramatic on its own. All of it needing a deliberate decision from me, one file at a time, on a Sunday.
It's a small and very literal version of what everyone says about changing your name. The admin is the easy part, there's more of it than you expect, and the version of you that other systems hold takes a while to catch up.
My DNS caught up in about an hour. Everything else is still in progress.