Hello! If you’re reading this post on the web, look up at your browser’s address bar. You’ll see something familiar up there: uni-watch.com, which was the old Uni Watch blog’s URL for many years before I shut down that site a few months ago and moved Uni Watch’s operations to Substack. Now I’ve applied that old URL, which I still own, to the Substack site.
Let’s shift to Q&A mode:
I’m reading the emailed version of this post. How do I see the new URL?
For any emailed Substack post, you can click on the headline (in this case it’s “Big Uni Watch News!”) to see the web version of that post. Or you can just go to the Uni Watch home page here. In fact, I recommend that you check out the home page so you can see the archive and various other features linked from the home page’s navigation bar.
I already bookmarked uniwatch.substack.com. Will that URL still work?
Yes. The old address will automatically redirect to uni-watch.com. (I did the same thing two years ago with my other Substack project, Inconspicuous Consumption, which was originally at paullukas.substack.com, but that now redirects to inconspicuous.info.)
The uni-watch.com URL is stupid and confusing, because it includes a hyphen. That just makes people mistakenly refer to Uni Watch as Uni-Watch.
Agreed. Here’s the backstory: When web developer John Ekdahl (R.I.P.) and I launched the blog in 2006, we used uniwatchblog.com (to differentiate the blog from the Uni Watch column I was writing at the time for ESPN). After a few years, when it was clear that the blog had developed its own community, its own culture, etc., we wanted to switch to uniwatch.com, but that was already taken — some guy in Panama was squatting on it. We made several offers to him, but he wouldn’t budge. So we went with the hyphenated version — uni-watch.com.
The hyphen isn’t ideal, it’s true, and it can definitely lead to some confusion about the project’s name. But the same could be said about uniwatch.com, because it would lead people to mistakenly think that Uni Watch is one word (Uniwatch or UniWatch). There’s no perfect solution, except maybe uni_watch.com, and I would never do that because the underscore looks so awkward.
Did it cost you anything to make the URL update?
Substack charges a one-time $50 fee for applying a custom domain.
Why did you wait until now to have the Substack URL redirect to the old blog URL, instead of doing it right when the Substack site launched a few months ago?
Honestly, I hated the hyphen and was initially glad to be rid of it. But I ultimately decided that it’s more fun to have a custom domain name instead of a Substack-based URL, plus I figure there could still be some old blog readers out there who haven’t checked in on Uni Watch in a while and might plug in the old URL. If even one person does that and discovers Uni Watch’s new iteration, it will have been worth it.
Also, I have to admit, seeing the old URL up there on the address bar makes me feel like I’ve reconnected with an old friend. Sure, it may be a flawed, imperfect friend, but whatever — most of us are flawed and imperfect. I like that it provides a throughline of continuity from the old blog, and I hope you feel the same.
I think that’s it. If you have any other questions about this, post them in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer.
Uni Watch, created by Paul Lukas, has been covering the world of athletics aesthetics since 1999. He also writes Inconspicuous Consumption, which is sort of like Uni Watch for everything other than sports.
glad to have the URL back. I never took it off my bookmarks, and clicking it out of habit doesn't make me sad anymore!
long live the hyphen!