Slowing Down: RateTea.net, RateTea.com, RateTea, and the Holidays

I was posting daily for a while, feeling very inspired to write, but I've slowed down, at least for this week. I can't keep up that level of energy indefinitely. Today I want to write a brief post highlighting some of the things that have been occupying my time and thought energy. But I'm also announcing that I'm taking a bit of a break for the holidays, where I will be enjoying tea a lot without writing about it as much. I'm not sure how much I'm going to slow down or take a break, but it's definitely going to happen.



Domain name news:

I was excited to buy the domain RateTea.com, which recently expired. There's a rather interesting story about this, involving Joshua Chamberlain of J-Tea International.

Yesterday, we switched RateTea.net to RateTea.com, and changed most of the naming that refers to the site to the more general RateTea. All the old links will remain valid and will be seamlessly redirected to the new site, so you don't really need to update any links, but we would prefer if people use the new domain for future links, and you can certainly update any links if it is easy for you to do so. If you missed it, you can read the official RateTea newsletter about the switch, and/or the press release: RateTea.net Acquires RateTea.com Domain, Becomes Named or Branded RateTea. The move is going smoothly, but there is a lot of work tying up the loose ends.

Whenever I go through with something like this, I get a little nervous. Is it going to influence search rankings of the site? So far, I haven't noticed any sort of a change. One thing I have noticed, however, is that because the URL's have all changed, all the social bookmarking / share counters have been reset. I think this is a little unfortunate, as I think those shares reflect the hard work of myself and the others on the site, and now they have been reset to zero until people re-share the pages via google, twitter, and the google +1 buttons. But I think this is a small price to pay for a change that I hope will look a lot better in the long-run.

Enjoying tea:

I have a lot of samples that I have not yet written reviews of. I received a gift of tea from Steph of Steph's Cup of Tea and I have yet to brew a single one. I've been drinking a lot of Ahmad tea Ceylon and not writing or thinking about it particularly deeply, just enjoying it. Upton Tea Imports also sent me some samples, as did Imperial Tea Garden. I've posted a few reviews but many of them are going to have to wait.

What do you think?

How much of a break do you take for the holidays? And do you think the change of RateTea from .net to .com will prove to be a good one in the long-run?