- Published on
The Beginning
- Authors
- Name
- Prashanth Manikyarajaiah
- @payaniga
The Whim
Back in 2009, I bought this domain (pqrs.in) on a whim. I didn't have any plans on what to make use of this domain. For the last fifteen years, the domain has been sitting idle/blank - except for a couple of short periods. For a few months I had a clone of [dabr.co.uk], an open source web interface for X(erstwhile Twitter). And later I had a custom URL shortener. This was purely for my own blog's URLs that I wanted to track the analytics when posted on Twitter or Facebook. As the time went by, I switched my hosting services a couple of times. And the domain transitioned to a blank landing page. During this saga, I added another 'side project' to the never ending list - "Move the personal from (now defunct) pqrshanth.com to pqrs.in". But procrastination got the better part of me and as it happens this task stayed as 'To Do' for a long time. As luck would have it, around this time last year, an issue/problem forced me out of the inertia.
The Opportunity
I had, and still have my travel blog hosted on a DigitalOcean droplet. The droplet hosted all three of my domains - with two of them being Wordpress blogs. For reasons unknown, my travel blog kept shutting down very erratically and I had to restart the Apache2 server. While initially this problem occurred once in a week or two, later it turned into an hourly occurrence. After trying to solve the issue for a couple months, I gave up on fixing the problem. To keep my sanity intact, I moved only the travel blog to a new droplet within DO. And then I was left with the task of starting a new blog on this domain. Since I wanted a lean minimalist blog, I asked my colleagues for alternatives. Guess what happens when you talk to a bunch of nerd? They drag you into a rabbit hole!
Rabbit Hole
The suggestions came pouring in - Ghost, Astro, Hugo, Github pages, Jekyll, Strapi and the list goes on. The not so good thing was, all these suggestions came in at varied stages. I spent a month or two (yes, I know I am slow!) exploring and tinkering a Ghost template. Then came the second option dropped in - "You know what? 'Astro' is better than Ghost. Give it a try". I spent another couple of months to get down that rabbit hole. And these sequences repeated for about 8-9 months for me to finally come to this stage. I have managed to get out of that loop (I hope!). This blog is using timlrx's Next.js, Tailwind CSS blogging starter template.
I hope to spend more time writing than going back to tinkering the blog. Watch out for more of my rants going forward.