Suppose you want to run someone else’s blog. Not steal it, exactly. Just quietly continue it under a name that is legally distinct enough that nobody sends an email. Keep the posts, keep the opinions about inotify, keep the layout override you never finished. Only the name on the door changes.

This is a short guide. The someone else, in my case, is me.

Step 1: pick a name that is close, but not too close

The new name has to clear a few bars. It must be pronounceable by a human who is not currently looking at it. It must survive a domain registrar without a hyphen. It must not already be a Mastodon instance run by someone with more free time and more anger than you.

I ran git grep -i mynacol, counted the hits, and started brainstorming replacements that shared enough letters to feel like the same lineage. After a satisfying amount of muttering, I landed on Macrogol. Six letters in common with the original. Rolls off the tongue. Vaguely Latin, vaguely serious, the sort of word a small consultancy would have.

I registered the domain. I updated hugo.toml. I updated baseURL, both title fields, both homeInfoParams, the author param, the README. I pushed. I felt clever for roughly forty minutes.

Step 2: commit before you google, regret after

A friend replied to my “new blog name, same great content” message with a single line:

isn’t macrogol the laxative

Reader, it is. Macrogol is polyethylene glycol 3350. It is the stuff you dissolve in a large glass of water the night before a colonoscopy. Its entire professional purpose is to keep things moving.

So that is the brand now. A personal blog about Linux, self-hosting and privacy, named after an osmotic laxative. Honestly it is not the worst metaphor for a homelab: mostly water, works slowly, occasionally dramatic.

Step 3: find everything you missed

Renaming a blog is a lesson in how many places a name hides. The obvious ones go quickly. Then you notice the <title> in the generated index.xml, the alt text on the favicon, the OpenGraph tags, that one hardcoded string in a partial you copied from the theme two years ago.

enableGitInfo = true is the real fun. Every historical commit still renders the old name in the footer’s “last modified” line, linking back to a repo path that now redirects. You can rebrand the present. The git log stays exactly as smug as it was.

Step 4: tell people, or don’t

There is a bold option here where you change nothing else and let RSS readers work it out themselves. One day the feed is one name, the next day it is another, same avatar, same posting schedule, no explanation. Let them wonder whether they subscribed to a person or inherited a franchise.

I am taking the slightly more responsible path and writing this post instead.

In conclusion

“Faking” your own blog under a new name turns out to be indistinguishable from simply renaming it. Same person, same archive, same half-finished draft about NixOS that will never ship. The only real change is that the branding is now, medically speaking, a stool softener.

If you are reading this in a feed reader that still says the old name: don’t worry about it. Everything is fine. Everything is moving along nicely.