Or a tale of how I made a beginner mistake and lost cspray.net.

From roughly 2011 to 2015 I wrote on a far more regular basis at a blog hosted on cspray.net. It was my attempt to put material up about my thoughts on programming and technology in an attempt to get noticed by an employer. A couple of the posts got some attention, they were picked up by programming news aggregators, and overall the blog accomplished its purpose.

I had never intended to abandon the blog; I enjoy writing and there's a lot of ideas that I have about blog articles. The problem then, and still now, is simply finding the time to sit down and write the article! As I started to progress in my career my time to write blog posts really disappeared and I all but stopped posting. In the midst of not posting I made a classic web-developer mistake; I forgot to auto-renew the domain and it got picked up by a domain squatter and they wanted $5,000 for it.

:'(

I had lost a pretty cool domain and one that I had written a lot of blog posts for that got shared around by people. I was pretty upset that I had lost the site and all those links back to my content were now dead. Fortunately I still had all the content itself but without an audience it didn't feel like it mattered all that much. Life continued to move on and I reconciled myself to never getting the domain back and starting over with a new online presence, cspray.io. I have fully transitioned to the domain with my personal site, blog, and primary email being on cspray.io. And, of course, I've remembered to turn on auto-renew and am sure to check my domain accounts every month or so after my painful lesson.

A year or so ago I was doing some of that domain maintenance and I noticed randomly that cspray.net was available again at its normal price. The domain squatter had forgot to auto-renew and I was able to get my domain back! Bringing back the domain made me go trudge through the archives and find the old blog posts that I have and it made me realize that some of them still stood up to the test of time... or were worth revisiting to provide updated opinions. Over the next few months I'll be reposting some of that old content in hopes that it'll be valuable to a new audience.

If you go to cspray.net now it redirects you to cspray.io. :)