Yashvinblogs.com : The origins

Hello.

If you follow me on Facebook, you can’t have missed that superb feast I posted yesterday night. Along with my ex-colleagues, we have been back to one of our favorite Friday hang-out spots to catch up and enjoy our usual fried fish dishes. At one particular moment, we started talking about the blog and Ashvin suggested to write on the origins of the domain name yashvinblogs.com. In fact, he was totally right since I never revealed how the domain name was chosen and publicly announced shortly before I celebrated the blog’s 2nd anniversary in October 2008.

Formerly yashvin.net

For those who have been reading the blog since the beginning, you probably remember me writing on yashvin.net which I acquired in March 2008. Today, my rarely-updated photo blog is accessible on that web address. Only married ones can understand how priorities and hobbies change.

Everything was running smoothly for the blog until I decided to change hosting servers and at that point of time, yashvin.net was not legally on my name. To avoid taking any risks of having the blog shut down while resolving any possible conflict with the ownership of yashvin.net, I decided to buy a new domain name and grab this opportunity to ‘rebrand’ the blog accordingly.

Choosing a new domain name

Taking life-long decisions is probably one of the hardest things in life. Well, choosing a new domain name was similar. It was very painful to think about what could represent the new blog and how the choice could turn out to be beneficial to the site’s referencing in search engines and memorable so that visitors did not have to think hard before typing the web address in their browser.

Next, I had to take another decision : Should I take a .mu, the country code top-level domain of Mauritius? For those who don’t know the “.mu” is privately-owned and the government is struggling to get its ownership. Right from the beginning, I decided to abandon the “.mu” because of the exagerated costs associated with it. For info, a “.mu” account costs around Rs2,000 yearly while a “‘com” or ‘.net” one costs only Rs400 yearly.

For several days, I tried every combination of words which were still available. Then, I decided to get some advice from friends. And during one of our conversations at work, Ashvin had a brilliant suggestion. That’s what he said :

Since you love to blog, why don’t you use the words ‘yashvin blogs‘ ?

yashvin blogs : It sounded nice. And still sounds as nice today, 6 years later. And hopefully, for more and more years to come, provided I have that same enthusiasm and time to find new and hot blog topics. btw, suggestions for new blog posts are the most welcomed.

That’s how yashvinblogs.com was born.

So, thank you Ashvin 😉