How are you wonderful people? After a hundred different delays and a million different excuses here I finally am with a new blog entry. I know I’ve been constantly threatening to do it, but one exciting development and one epiphany finally made me want to start doing this again.

Let me get to it with a nice little backstory :)

I’ve always shared my work in the online space under the name “audiphotography”. It was initially going to be Audi’s Photography but I felt the apostrophe would be a hassle for people to type in, and in the interest of keeping it simple, stuck to my nick name + photography. A few years into doing this, someone had approached me to make a website. Now I had worked on websites before, I was breifly partnered in a website and design firm, so I knew the importance of it, but I just didn’t think I needed it. At the time I felt social media was where everyone was going to be and wouldn’t want to leave the platform. So sometime in 2012 after having sat down for a few meetings at Costa Coffee in Kormanagala, Bangalore, we agreed to go ahead with the website. The proposition was the developer would design and maintain it for me, I provide the content, we place google ads through banners in there and split the revenue. For something I wasn’t keen on initially, the extra income didn’t seem like a bad idea. And so began the life of www.audiphotography.com. As with anything new, I was super excited to get this going. I started blogging actively, shared my travel portfolio, behind the scenes, photography learnings that I had absorbed from the internet and an active forum. I had created some hype around it, and on the day I launched it, in minutes, it crashed. Went up again half and hour later, and promptly crashed again. The website had thosands of visitors on the first day which neither of us expected, that load coupled with some issues on the backend, led to the crashes. After updating the server and find a more stable wordpress theme, the glitches were fixed and we were live.

Here’s what that website looked like. Fun Fact : I never took out the Beta, I should probably bring it back!

People as always were very kind in their response to the website, used the forum actively to discuss a few things and shared my blogs extensively. The dev would share stats from Alexa.com, that showed how well the website was doing, I felt super happy and kept contributing. As more people started visting the website, more people would get in touch with me for work enquiries. That started keeping me really busy. This started taking a toll on how much time I’d spend online, in writing and creating content for the site, the dev would follow up often but I’d be sharing with a reduced frequency. From multiple times a week to a couple of times a month. Roughly a year later, when I tried logging onto the website I couldn’t. I said audiphotography.com wasn’t accessible any more. I texted the dev to find out, who said he’ll look into it, might be a wordpress issue (This had happened a few times before so I wasn’t necessarily worried just yet). Soon I get a callback saying the site had lapsed. I was devastated, I was trying to figure out how this might have happened, I didn’t get any reminder emails, but also it wasn’t registered to my mail id in the first place. The email id it went to was an alternate email id the dev had which he didn’t frequent much. There they were, all the reminders! And just like that, audiphotography.com was no more. The dev said there was no need to panic, we could get in touch with the domain registrar and get it back. They ofcourse wanted a domain redemption fee and what not which would cost almost 15 times of just getting a domain for one year, while we were on with the tech support about this, guess what? Another curve ball, some one else purchased the domain, it had been exactly a week since the domain had expired at this point, open to anyone to purchase. Now we had to get in touch with the guys who purchased the domain, to see if we can buy it back. Because my website had decent traction, the guys who had bought my website wanted a ridiculous amount of money, upwards of 4000$ at the time, that’s 400 times the cost of the domain now. I wasn’t going to pay that much money, it felt like extortion. The maximum I was willing to go to was 500$, but that was too little for them. After a lot of back-and-forth and much sulking, I finally just gave up. I said let’s see if they renew it next year and then we can try again. In the mean time I tried auditphotography.in, auditya.me and all that. I purchased all those domains but it just didn’t feel the same. I never got around to creating a website, I just lost interest. The next year came, they promptly renewed it, and so did they the year after that. The last time I received any update from them was in May 2016 with an offer of 1600$, Here’s that email.

The last offer I received to purchase the domain.

I didn’t respond. I had given up on getting the website entire at this point. Funnily though till this day, my email footer has that same web address in it, i just delete it before sending every email, instead of deleting the footer itself in the settings, I wonder why that is. Anyway later in 2016 I managed to buy auditya.com, someone long back told me make sure you get yourname.com and just keep it, you know when it’ll come in handy, so that was a small success and this website has been live on that address since later that year, I meant to launch this website but it didn’t feel the same, so I’ve just left it as it is. It’s barely been updated, the last time was somewhere in 2017 I think. Anyway, fast forward to today. My friend Atin messaged me out of the blue asking me why I haven’t registered audiphotography.com. We became friends after this entire fiasco so this conversation had never come up. If you were around me in 2013 when the website went down, trust me, you would have heard about it! I was shocked to find out it was available. I then went onto tell him about what happened, just as I’ve shared with you guys. I did this ofcourse as I picked up the domain for a good price of just 10$ :) I was so thankful for that moment, and I thanked him very much. I’m lucky I’m surrounded by people like him who constantly look out for me. You can find him here , if I continue to be regular over here and share more (which I intend to), he’s the one to thank! I’ve rerouted audiphotography.com to auditya.com, but in just doing that much, my website feels different, feels complete. It sounds stupid I know, it probably is, but I find it’s suddenly brought back that enthusiasm from many years ago. I’ve ofcourse had many chances to continue doing that with this website. Infact as I grew I started doing so many more things than just photography, so auditya.com was more appropriate,but I still came up with excuses. Now, I have none left. This time around though, I’ll be sure to check my email for reminders more often, and find a balance approach so I don’t stop sharing stories here just because I got busy! Also I’m not going to be sharing this on social media, atleast not right away, it’s just going to befor those of you that visit this website every month on your own and those you might share it to. Hopefully it’s worth your while, let me know in the comment below :) I’ll get working on more stories and thoughts to share, in the mean time, I’m going to get the rest of this site ironed out! Stay safe people.

Why I have had a dyfunctional webiste