The saga with chol.dev
When I finally decided to create a personal blog back in 2024 I wanted to use chol.dev, but it was taken by another developer in Europe. I had no choice, he wasn’t really hosting anything meaningful on it, it seemed like a placeholder for his portfolio. Instead, I went with choln.dev, I ran that up until this guy’s domain expired.
I managed to get the domain chol.dev this year (2025) when it finally expired, and at a huge bargain, 10 AUD per year with Namecheap.
I was super excited, but I had a few challenges ahead. choln.dev hasn’t fully expired yet, I would still like any links for it redirected to chol.dev. I also had to create new SSL certificates with certbot.
The move
So now I had purchased the domain and I configured the DNS, but the real hard work was re-configuring NGINX. I have to be honest, I understand which config files I need to edit, but I’m not so confident with the nginx config language. It was a no-brainer here to consult ChatGPT. I took the existing config and told the LLM to modify it such that choln.dev redirects to chol.dev. Then create a new server block for chol.dev.
When all this was completed I needed to run certbot again to get new SSL certificates for chol.dev.
Conclusion
I do feel sorry for the guy that had bought chol.dev, but he ceased using the domain, so I think it’s only fair I borrow it. Having a short domain that matches my name, makes it easy for people to find me. Now I can go “it’s my [first name] dot dev” rather than spelling out “choln dot dev”.
I’m again impressed by how quickly I how was able to make the change I needed with ChatGPT, this shows once again LLMs have taken the role of StackOverflow. It did indeed save me trips to StackOverflow and obscure blogs. Yes I could just RTFM, but seriously, does anyone have time for that these days? It could be also argued that doing it yourself is an insurance policy should the Luddites burn ChatGPT to the ground. We’ll cross that bridge when we get there I guess.
Of course, it didn’t all go smoothly, I had a few hiccups in the nginx config, but reading the error logs helped me fix those issues. One issue was when SSL cert was not there, so I had to remove the SSL directives ChatGPT added, so I can let certbot add them in.
Oh and yes, ChatGPT gave me the certbot command that worked first shot for nginx.
So I’m very pleased with this move. The next challenge now is being consistent with blogging.