Back in 2013, I spent an entire afternoon bragging to my friends that I had my own domain.
Not .blogspot.com. My own domain. I had gotten a .cc extension for free by following a tutorial from a physical book I borrowed, and I had absolutely no intention of mentioning that part. What I told them was that I had set up custom A records and CNAME configurations, which was technically true and also made me sound like I understood what I was doing. For about a week, I sent people the link unprompted. I checked the analytics obsessively. I felt, for the first and possibly last time in my life, like someone who had figured something out early.
Then the free service quietly gave up. The domain just stopped resolving. I spent a few days pretending I had not noticed, refreshing it on different browsers as if that might help, before I finally accepted what had happened and slipped back to .blogspot.com. I never explained this to anyone.
That was my introduction to web infrastructure.
When blogs were something people had
Before any of that, there was the blogging scene itself, and it was genuinely a scene.
In high school, having a blog was something a real number of people actually did. My friends who liked writing kept their own corners of the internet. They posted about their days, things they were reading, small opinions, big feelings. Some of them had readers who were strangers, which felt remarkable at the time, the idea that someone in another city was following along with your life because they liked how you wrote about it.
We had blog clubs. Not in an ironic way. Actual groups of people who were into the same blogging platform, who traded tips about templates and writing and building an audience. And then there was Kopdar, short for Kopi Darat, which is an Indonesian term for meeting in person with people you only knew online. Someone would organize a gathering, and people who had only ever interacted through comment sections would show up at a cafe and talk for hours. I went to a few. They were genuinely good.
I was not really there for the writing, though. I was there because I had looked at a friend's blog and thought her template looked incredible, and I wanted mine to look like that too.
Learning by breaking things, mostly
Blogger let you edit templates directly. At the time I thought this was just a feature. Looking back, it was a trap I was completely unprepared for.
Good templates cost money I did not have. Free templates existed but they looked like free templates. So I found a base one I liked well enough and started making small changes, adjusting colors, moving elements around, trying to get it to look less generic. Sometimes this worked. Sometimes I refreshed the preview and something had gone wrong in a way I could not trace back to anything I had changed. Sometimes fixing one section caused a sidebar to disappear entirely. I spent entire evenings in that edit-refresh-panic loop, convinced that I had permanently broken something.
I did not realize this was completely normal. I thought I was just bad at it.
The posts I wrote during this period were all over the place. School things, things I was thinking about, a few opinions I was not yet wise enough to keep to myself. There were weeks where it felt natural, where I would sit down and something would come out and I would be happy with it. And then there were longer stretches where I was clearly just publishing something so the blog would not look abandoned. I was not a consistent writer. I was someone who wanted to have a blog, which is a slightly different thing.
The .com era (a cautionary tale)
Eventually Blogger started to feel limiting in a way I could not precisely name. A friend mentioned WordPress. I had been saving money for something, I cannot remember what, and I decided this was what it was for. I bought a .com domain. I paid for shared hosting through a local provider. I set everything up over a weekend and felt, for the second time, like someone who had figured something out.
For about two weeks, I was extremely productive at not writing.
WordPress has plugins for everything. SEO plugins, performance plugins, caching plugins, security plugins, and then plugins to manage the other plugins, many of them paid. I spent whole evenings reading documentation for features I had not yet decided I needed. I joined forums to ask questions about my setup. I compared hosting packages I was already paying for against hosting packages I could theoretically switch to. The actual writing, the thing I had theoretically built all this infrastructure to support, kept getting pushed further down the list.
The gap between posts stretched out from weeks to months. I stopped visiting the dashboard. When the domain renewal notice arrived, I read it, thought about it for a moment, and did not renew.
I moved back to Blogger, free hosting and just the domain cost. That lasted a while. Then I got tired of that too, and the whole thing wound down quietly.
2016, and then a long pause
College started, and somewhere in that transition the blog just stopped being something I did.
It did not end dramatically. The blog club group chats went quiet gradually, one person posting less, then another, until the conversations that used to run for pages had stopped happening at all. Friends who had posted every week had moved on to other things without making any kind of announcement. The scene that had felt so alive a few years earlier had simply dispersed, and nobody seemed to feel the need to mark it.
I deleted the blog at some point. I could not tell you exactly when. I canceled the domain subscription. At the time it felt like clearing out something I was done with. I did not think much about it.
I did not write anything online for years after that.
2026, with a VPS and questionable restraint
I found Ghost this year, and something about it made me want to try again.
It sits in a place that actually works for me: cleaner than WordPress, more capable than Blogger, and a self-hosted option so I was not stuck paying cloud pricing indefinitely. I set up a VPS. Then I added analytics, because I wanted to know if anyone was reading. Then monitoring, because I wanted to know if the site went down. Then automated deployment, because manually SSH-ing in to update things felt tedious. Then a few other things I will not list here because the total count is a little embarrassing. If you want the full technical story, it is in this post.
Is it more infrastructure than a personal blog strictly needs? Yes, clearly. But here is the difference from every other time I have done this: the setup is finished. I am not tweaking it instead of writing. I opened a draft this week and wrote something, and then I wrote this, and at some point I stopped waiting to feel ready and just started.
I still have no idea if anyone will read it. But the last time I was here, I was bragging about a free .cc domain that lasted eight days. By that measure, things are going pretty well.