So it is the time of the year when my domain registrar pings notifying me of domain expiration and reminds me of all the adventures I’ve had with this domain, this blog. And after contemplating for some time, the inner writer whispers, ‘iss awsar par ek post toh banta hai’.
Before this one, I had a couple of other blogs. The goal with those blogs was making money (and learning and knowledge sharing, but honestly, I wanted to taste money). There’s a difference between writing for yourself and writing for a wider, more general audience while thinking about SEO and praying to the gods at Google to increase your PR. After a while, finding no success and realizing that I wasn’t enjoying it that much (you know you’re obsessed with traffic and pageviews when you open Google Analytics every 30 minutes!), I gave up on that and started this personal blog, convincing myself that traffic oriented blogging isn’t my piece of cake. Four years ago, in that article, I wrote this, not knowing how it will turn out.
So, you may ask, what is this thing? The thing you are reading this on! Isn’t it a blog?
Yes it surely it, but I feel it is more than a blog. It is a diary. I don’t really care if no one reads this blog, and as a result, if you look at the source code, there is no analytics code installed. It simply means I never know how many people visit this blog, if at all they do. All I know is I enjoy writing here far more that what I did writing on a blog where people actually came to read stuff.
I’m happy that it was a successful experiment. Writing without the lure of traffic and affiliate commission is much more liberating, and you can be extremely honest about whatever you like. Most importantly, this place has become sort of a hangout for me, a diary and a place to reflect. I sometimes simply read the old articles to find spelling and grammatical errors, haha. There are so many of them, but I correct none. Correcting them would be slowly erasing the past me, so let that stay as it is. It gives me a nice perspective on how my interests, my hobbies and simpler things like the way I construct sentences, are changing. And change is good.
Thank you for reading.