Our most requested feature has nearly always been the ability to change a blog’s URL. We’ve been working on a system that lets you do just that and I am pleased to tell you that it is almost ready!

Just to clarify what I’m talking about, we are making it possible to give your WordPress.com blog a different URL. For example, your blog can live at yourdomain.com or blog.yourdomain.com instead of yourblog.wordpress.com.

Domain registration and mapping are sensitive, technical operations and we want these processes to be easy. To that end, the development and testing have to be thorough. While I was setting up test domains it occurred to me that I ought to set them up on live blogs rather than test blogs. The more traffic the systems gets during testing, the more confidently we can release the feature.

So here’s my idea: I’ll sneak into a few of your dashboards when you aren’t looking and give you a brand new domain based on your current one. If you like it, keep it as your blog URL until it expires or you renew it. If you don’t like it, you’ll be able to switch back to your wordpress.com domain. If you decide to keep it, all of your old URLs (permalinks) will still work. They’ll simply redirect visitors to the new URL.

It’s a bit of a treat and a bit of a trick. This is for testing, remember? Something might go horribly wrong and your blog might become inaccessible to visitors from Bangalore or Biloxi. You might not like the domain. You might be such a fan of WordPress that you miss your old subdomain. In any event, you will be able to switch your blog back to its old URL any time. The free URL also expires after one year, so you’ll have to pay to renew it or lose it. Tricky, huh?

I’ve set up a new domain for a friend already (Rhieinnon) but I don’t have that many friends so I’m just going to cruise comments on the top blogs for victims. First victim: Raincoaster. Watch out!

p.s. Matt had the idea of making the new domains free for a random selection of people who sign up. More details when we release the feature. (Soon!)