Making rajspace.in

I built my first personal home page, rajspace.org* in 2001. Despite the presence, the site never quite lived up to my expectations. I always felt it was outdated and did not reflect my evolving online identity. Life was moving, interests shifted, career thrived, family grew. Valid developments, all well justified. Yet, the fact remained.

During the holiday season of Dec 2023, I started to refresh the site & committed to bring it into shape.

  • Choosing a minimalist no-design design: This removed the barrier of selecting one design over 1000s of choices. No decision on color. White background and black text is the only option. It brought the focus on the content.
  • Quality over quantity: Less words. Meaningful words. Weighing every sentence. Eliminating the fluff. For instance, I wanted to focus on the most valuable resource of our lives, time. Hence the second line in the home page says “I spend my time on” instead of an identify-focus i,e “I am…”, It took 3 days to come to a conclusion & multiple iterations over months.
  • Focus on writing travel experiences: In the past, the blog was a potpourri of anything and everything. I decided that not all them need to be public. I hid them posts and retained only travel-related posts. It wasn’t easy but it has paid-off. The focus on one genre motivates me to write more. I directed enterprise tech and leadership content to LinkedIn. Random musings, I throw them on X
  • Inspirations from others: While I am the only one working on the site (except for some tech assistance by Sreejith), this does not mean nobody has contributed. I am inspired by the design and content of 5 people & 1 organization. Thanks to Dilip Kumar, Najva Sol, Nithin Kamath, Somendra Narayan, Thejesh GN, Berkshire Hathway. I have never met or directly interacted with them.

If you are interested in making a home page for yourself, please feel free to get in touch. Happy to guide and mentor.

* Why .org? Back then, only a handful of top-level domains existed. .edu & .gov were reserved for educational institutions and governments. Without a commercial angle I ignored .com. .net was an also option but I opted for .org instead. After a brief fling with rajspace.net, I finally tied the knot with rajspace.in.