Renaming my blog: why BerLingo?

Today I have ummed and aahed at great length regarding how best to rename my blog. I set it up on a bit of a whim on my phone one day over Christmas 2014, on a trip down to Devon, so I wasn’t thinking much about accessibility, nor my audience, nor having a memorable URL. I did, however, have a small screen to work with and a limited knowledge of WordPress from when I dabbled in private blogging during my final year of university. I therefore ended up spawning this blog from that old blog, which meant that my old username was reused as part of the URL (I think that’s what happened, anyway!) That meant that my blog’s URL was originally vivalavida18.wordpress.com which, although containing the lyrics to one of my favourite ever Coldplay songs and one of my life  mottos, wasn’t particularly memorable or relevant to the content I envisaged for said new blog.

I now have 12 or so posts on my blog, and have been kindly encouraged to set it live by two bloggers who I already regard as experts in the ELT blogging arena, despite my minimal experience: Sandy Millin and Adam Simpson. So, I thought it was high time to try and make my URL hint vaguely at the content that lies beneath.

I would partly like the blog to follow along similar teaching lines as the excellent blogs by Sandy and Adam, above. That is, I plan to continue blogging about my CELTA course, as well as my quest for jobs in Berlin and my first real teaching experiences (presuming I get a job, that is!) But I would also like to include information on Berlin, as my love for the city forms a large part of the rationale behind my slightly crackpot scheme to quit my job and move back to Germany. So I was playing around with words relating to ‘English’ and ‘Berlin’ and eventually settled upon BerLingo.

A Citroen Berlingo – this is not what my blog is about!

It’s a bit cheesy, I know, and is also a type of Citroen van, but I’m quite happy with it as a slightly quirky blog name. The only sad thing is that berlingo.wordpress.com was taken, so I thought I would retain my lucky number out of the original blog URL and become berlingo18.wordpress.com. Hopefully that’s slightly more memorable – and perhaps if my blog does ever go anywhere, I might consider taking the advice of a Web Developer friend at work, who started talking about paid domain names and lots of complicated things. He assured me WordPress had helpful guidelines, but I think renaming the site on WordPress was the best I can manage for now…

So please do let me know your thoughts! I think I do now have to re-link some of my original hyperlinks within posts, but hopefully that’s worth the effort before I set my blog public and open it to the wider world (ok, to my mum and boyfriend) for their opinion!

Addendum from March 6th:

Another reason I’m happy I called my blog ‘berlingo.’ These are French sweeties called ‘berlingot’, which is pronounced just how my blog is spelled 🙂 Thanks to Hada Litim for pointing this happy coincidence out to me!

As if the aforementioned reasons weren’t enough for me to be secretly chuffed with the name I have chosen for my blog, the wonderful Hada Litim (@HadaLitim) added me on Facebook today, and posted this picture >>

I am now even happier to have chosen the name ‘berlingo’ for my blog and little online presence, because I love the fact that these sweeties, called ‘berlingot’ but pronounced without the /t/ in French, are so multicoloured 🙂