It’s 2016 and this is my first blog post of the year. I’m writing it on this blog that served me so well for almost 13 years. The domain, which I bought after realizing that that’s what the grown-up blogs do, was the first domain-name I bought, but it definitely wasn’t the last.
The second one I bought was for a web-service that lived only in it’s concepts, which in itself were not far more than a few notes scribbled in a text-editor. No surprise it never came to fruition. I kept the name for a year, then realized it was a bad idea anyway and slowly let it lapse.
The next ones I bought were kept for longer. When the tumble-log craze of the mid 2000s came, I bought intrepidlytrite.com. Back then I thought it was a fun idea to jot down the notes, quotes, pictures and whatever else I stumbled upon on my travels through the web. I attached it first to a tumblr account, then a soup.io account, but after years of rather willful neglect more or less forgot about it. Still, I kept it around, attached it to a few other blog ideas I had, which again, rarely ever made it off the ground.
At the end of the last year, I let this one lapse too. Compared to my ill-fated webservice, I felt some hesitation when I decided not to renew it. It had belonged to me for a while and even though nothing great came of it, ever, I liked the name (even though I don’t anymore think it’s as witty as I thought it was). But I simply saw that I had too many domains.
It’s a funny thing with domain names. As with the two above, they’re always the first thing you buy when you have a great idea. Getting projects off the ground is hard, thinking up domain-names isn’t – it’s actual fun! And once you’ve bought it, you attach it to a blog or a “coming soon” service and feel elated. The rude awakening comes a few weeks, months or years later when you realize that you’re still paying for this name that never went anywhere.
It’s not always that tragic, though. Another of the names I bought was medienschelte.at, a media-watchblog I founded with a friend in the mid-2000s. The project went strong for three years, until we both one day noticed that we’re sick of reading crap newspapers. But the site is still up, for posterity’s sake and as a vigil to the accumulated weeks I spent going through said newspapers finding crappy stuff they wrote in their crappy articles. Finding these things wasn’t exactly fun, but it was satisfying in the way popping a pimple feels. But I am digressing.
Earlier last year I made the decision to consolidate my online-outfits. I conceded to the cold, hard truth that most of the blogs I had running were being shamefully neglected and in order to remedy this, I’d have to find out which ones I still needed, which ones I didn’t and which ones I could easily transfer into this blog right here.
After a bit of hemming and hawing, I finally decided that my tech blog would have to be the first one to go and imported all my old posts into this blog. You can now find those under the category tech-stuff. Ironically, that’s how the tech-stuff posts started out, and for some reason I deemed it necessary to create a separate blog for all the things focusing on the tech world. Nowadays I’m more relaxed about it, so if someone reading up on my favourite podcast app happens to read about my visit to the Styrian alps, I don’t have a problem with it.
The next blog I’m planning on incorporating into this blog is my food blog. The name deathbymartini.com, as a play on death by chocolate, was fun when I came up with it, and even though I still like it, I feel it’s run its course. Also, when I created my food-blog, there was still some fun in it. Today it’s yet another niche that’s less about the initial topic and more about how to make money writing about that topic; a tendency that will befall every successful niche sooner or later.
Within my own kingdom of blogs that will leave me with the dukedom of colordisco.com, which I suspect will soon be incorporated into this blog as an aside category.
Then, there’s still hemmer.tv, a hidalgo of sorts and a domain I bought on a whim and which will probably at some point helm my broadcasting empire. But that, as so many other of my projects, will have to wait until the world is ready for it. Until then, the domain is parked somewhere on my webhost’s server.
I have to admit that while getting rid of domains is instilling a feeling of sadness akin to giving away a dog you’ve had for years but can’t keep anymore because you’re moving into a place that doesn’t allow dogs, it’s also kind of liberating (sorry, dog). I can concentrate on the actual content and I don’t have to face the fact that whatever projects I had in mind buying these domains have failed or never gotten off the ground. Also, it’ll be cheaper.