Last month, I was reminded by Bigrock.in about the pending renewal of nagekar.com. It was through an email. I had completely forgotten the date of registering the site and it came in as a handy reminder. 6th of June it was, in 2014.
I had an affinity towards blogs and blogging right from when I was 15. That was when I had seen the first blogs and shortly after that, it was when I created my first blog. It was in the morning, of 5th March, 2011. I knew I was up to something awesome. 7 in the morning, I was home alone. I remember mom and dad had to go out early, to receive some guests. I spent an effort filled three hours and finally got the site up at around 10 am. The domain was geekystuffforall.webs.com (It reads, Geeky Stuff For All, if you had trouble). It felt good, to have an identity. I wrote a paragraph for the homepage, which was the first post for me, ever.
Hi everyone, if you are searching for someone who thinks spending 8 hours in front of a PC is normal, you are at the right place ;)
You will not find any amazing new hacks or such stuff here.Then why this site ? It is because I am not a computer expert but computer enthusiast just like you. I will try to share whatever new I come to know. I would be extremely pleased to hear from you.
By the way I am Abhishek Nagekar. You can meet me on Facebook(If you like to !!)
And that was also the last thing I wrote on that blog. It was not that I got bored or anything, but I was quick to realize more amazing platforms are available that gave more control to bloggers. I created something called cyber-outlaws.blogspot.com to post all the tricks and hacks I then knew. I worked pretty well. I had around 800 views in the first month, which is good number compared to even this blog. Then came many more blogs on numberous subdomains on almost every popular free hosting out there. My 'niche' had changed from hacks and tricks to mobiles and gadgets, news and reviews alike. I though about moving on from something.somehost.com to something.com, mostly because of the fact that I could have a custom@something.com like email address. I registered my first top level domain, lulztec.com on Godaddy. It costed about INR 99, or USD 2, under a promo scheme. It was back in May or June, 2013. I was just out of junior college, and it was time to make some money. I blogged and blogged, but did not get the traffic I was expecting. After 2 or 3 failed attempts to signup for Google Adsense, I finally settled for Chitika and Infolinks. I didn't make anything for the next 6 months I kept them on my site (I did actually make $2.80, but I will call it nothing because the cashout was $100, so I never actually got anything in hand).
I thought there was more to blogging than just posting new stuff everyday. I moved everything to a paid hosting company called Visiba. They were charging around $2/month back then. I was really impressed by their service and kept my blog there for another three months. Later, not seeing any improvements, I had to think what next to do, that would work. I purchased a small VPS from DigitalOcean, where I moved the blog and started writing Linux tutorials. I was paying $5/month to DigitalOcean, which is considered low for a VPS. Still, there was no sign of revenue and I was spending a great deal of time on blogging. I knew I had to change things. I registered a new domain called tutshub.net, where I decided to post technical tutorials. It worked only a little better with this one. Meanwhile, I was accompanied by my school friend, who used to be a blogger too. Together, we managed to get our blog under alexa 400k which was cool, I thought. Also, we tried our hands in the web development world, and registered nakshtra.org, which failed miserably. Tutshub.net was going good and it was mostly because of my partner Harshal, who worked harder than me. Here's a snapshot I found at archive.org
But we decided to stop that blog. The last post was made in February 2014, and then we orphaned it. Blogging helped me to realize there is much more I can do, than just write about other people's achievements. I got to be better than that, I thought. I still don't know if it was a good decision but it definitely helped me concentrate on myself. It was a few months later, in June, that I got this blog. It was not aimed to be a traffic scoring blog, because I know for sure now, I cannot blog for traffic. One year passed, 30 articles written, tried many new languages and frameworks, got accepted by Adsense, did average in academics, made some great friends in college and many great things happened in just this year. I am glad I decided to start this blog which, as I have always said, is a diary to me.
As it happened, many people have appreciated the things I write, and there have been a lot of feedbacks, positive and constructive alike. I share this one year with you'll, who took the time to read my thoughts. The past is history, quite a beautiful one. You, me, we grew wiser each day, and we've no intention of changing that. Finally, happy birthday! to my blog. Here's to more good content in future.