So, last time I left you a cliffhanger. I had a domain, but absolutely no idea what to do with it, except for using it as an email address. Should I just let it rot there?! Pretty soon I decided to write and format a pretty CV on my own website.
It’s a question of time. Is it?
After renting the domain, the obvious next step was designing the homepage. After a quick Google search, I decided to use GitHub Pages, which was perfect (and free;). My site was online in no time! The only problem was that my domain still wasn’t connected. The site was tanishacharya.github.io, not tanishacharya.ch. Oh bother:((
I spent an embarrassing amount of hours in front of the screen, staring at DNA DNS records, CNAMEs, and txt files. What do they do, how are they connected? I fell into a MASSIVE rabbit hole (Kaninchenloch?), learning even more about the great World Wide Web. After I connected the dots and pointed my domain to my actual GitHub site, it was finally working!
OR SO I THOUGHT…
At this point, tanishacharya.ch was working, but www.tanishacharya.ch was not! How is that even a thing?! Didn’t the person who invented the web have any brains?! I cannot tell you how many forums i read or how many tabs were open at once. Everybody seemed to say the same thing: just wait for DNS propagation. To me that just sounded like developer-talk for: “We actually have absoulutely no fu*king idea:))”
But eventually it worked. Both of them just worked (Though it did feel like all the glaciers melted and could build up again in that time).
ANYWAY, why tf is there a blog here?
My site had been set up. It existed now. A dark and empty space. Just asking to be filled up with something.
I though, I have this beautiful domain, I put in my blood, sweat, and tears into this project. So why not just throw a blog on it (This reasoning made more sense at that time)?
This thinking actually surprised me. I have never really liked writing essays. It was a skill I was forced to learn, even did learn, but it still didn’t become my passion. If you ask my English teacher, I really suck at writing essays (Although, it was a literary analysis). My German teacher would say the complete opposite (am I the problem or is the system the problem, we will never know). And yet, here I was, voluntarily writing paragraphs. FOR FUN.
The difference, I think, is this: I absolutely LOVE telling stories. I’ve always been the person, who turns a five-minute story into a twenty-minute production with at least 5 sidestories and a completely unnecessary backstory. I just never wrote those stories down. Writing always meant an Einleitung, Hauptteil, Schluss, a wordcount, and getting the text back with every ever so little mistake marked with a fat, red pen.
Here, there is no grade. There’s no prompt. Nobody is checking whether my arguments are valid and constantly judging me (except for myself). I can use strikethrough for jokes like a normal person and NOBODY can stop me. Muhahahahahha. As it turned out, it wasn’t the writing that I didn’t like, it was the obligation. Who would have thought…
The overkill phase
Owning a website is like having a virus. Once you’ve got it, it’s hard to get rid of. Suddenly a simple blog wasn’t enough. What about a newsletter? My readers could subscribe and get my very creative posts directly delievered to their mailbox. All this for the two people or so who read read my one post. What about a contact form? Sure, anybody who would want to reach me, could. But a form would feel more official, more real. Whether any of these features will see the light of the day remains to be seen. I make no promises. But I’m having too much fun to stop. And how else would I procrastinate?
There is a specific kind of madness that takes over when you build something that’s completely yours. Every feature feels justified in the moment. In hindsight, not so much. But that’s the thing about unplanned projects – they have their own way of becoming the ones you care about the most.
This is the last part of this series. The next blog post will be something ✨else✨