Unspoken benefit of owning a domain
I was never a blogging person, but since I put this blog up (for reasons described below), it may as well have at least one post.
Recently I bought a domain (tehgm.net). Since then, I was browsing internet for ideas what to do with it. Many people posted about perks of owning a domain - claiming your online presence, hosting a blog or URL shortener, to name a few. But I haven’t seem many unique ideas.
This is where I realized that the fact of me browsing ideas is one benefit of owning a domain that most people don’t talk about - it gives me a reason to do something.
Why I bought tehgm.net
I am a software engineer, both by hobby and profession. However I never particularly liked web development (which is silly, considering I am working as ASP.NET software engineer). But one thing I wanted to have is a dashboard, which I could use to manage all of my Raspberry Pis (buying them is almost like an addiction) and my Discord bots. Server-side version of Microsoft Blazor is coming out of preview in a week from this post, which would reduce my pain with web dev - SPAs are more back-end dev friendly to develop websites compared to standard ways, and Blazor lets me use C# instead of pesky JavaScript.
Before I bought a domain, I intended to use No-IP to get an URL for my WIP dashboard. This would work just fine, but I was thinking “while at it, why not look into own domains?”. After all, I could at least secure my nickname domain. I checked some domain registrars and I bought tehgm.net cheaply on Namecheap. With its DynDNS service, I quickly linked dashboard to a subdomain, and this is where this all started…
Adding other stuff
After the dashboard (even though barely started) I got into “what else can I put on my domain?”. And in fact, this is exactly the reason why this blog even exists. I’m not a person to go too public, I mostly keep to myself and my close friends. The only blog I’ve had before was set up only because university required that for a coursework. But I was thinking about uses for my domain, and a blog is one of the simplest ideas one could get. I may never post here again, but what does it matter? blog.tehgm.net looks cool in browser address bar.
I also set up email through Zoho Mail. I may never actually use it, but hey, I’ve got a domain!
I am still thinking of further ideas. A browser based game? An ASP.NET Core based homepage to put my projects on? A random utilities webpage? I don’t know.
Having a domain feels cool
I told my best friend when he was buying his own domain after I bought mine: “owning a domain opens up possibilities. Ones which you de facto already had, but with own domain they’re just cooler”. I think that best summarizes the benefit of owning a domain. Besides all the benefits everyone talks around, it is simply cool, especially for the techy folks.