On Tuesday, with little fanfare and with no announcement that I could find, DDTC’s website was moved to a secret new address and went into hiding. Most export professionals had grown fond of DDTC’s unique URI: http://www.pmdtc.org. This was, until its disappearance, the only federal government website that I know of using the .org domain rather than a .gov domain, for reasons that no one has ever been able to explain (at least to me).

Typically when websites migrate to a new address they put a redirect on the old site for a while. You know, you’ve seen it before.

GenericWebsite.com has moved to GenericWebsite.us. Please update your bookmarks. Click here if you are not redirected in 10 seconds.

But DDTC didn’t do that. Nope, the old site just went poof. Since I have to imagine that the IT folks at DDTC knew how to do a redirect, this must be another effort by DDTC to go into hiding, as DDTC did when it declared that licensing officers won’t answer their phones until at least January.

Well, the gig is up! We found the new site. The new address is http://pmddtc.state.gov. Notice that sneaky extra ‘d’ that’s been inserted into ‘pmdtc’ just to make it harder to find and remember. At least, the new address isn’t pmodtc.state.gov. Now that would have been really confusing.

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Copyright © 2006 Clif Burns. All Rights Reserved.
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