While this is not my first blog site, I feel like it is my first REAL blog. When in my IT program for school we were required to have a blog and contribute to it as required by a few assignments. At time time I liked the concept of the blog but since I was still fairly new to the tech industry I felt a bit of imposter syndrome. Even today, I feel a bit of being inadequate on new topics and technologies, however I believe I have finally broke through. This blog on zachthorne.com is actually my fourth attempt at blogging and I have finally cracked the code as to what was hanging me up for the past almost six years, my domain name.

As many of you have read a domain name is important to your “personal brand”, I took that a little too personal and I hope sharing my experience will help others get past this roadblock. With my first blog site I didn’t take it all that seriously and didn’t want to spend money on a “domain name”, so I did what most people did in my course and chose a free Blogger site from Google and went off to create my theme and first post. As far as completing the assignments, the free blogger site did the trick and I kind of left it. A few years later, after I graduated and had been in the tech industry for a couple of years I decided that I was going to go ahead and buy a domain name and this is where the trouble began.

A domain isn’t a marriage

While I wanted to better establish my personal brand I thought that hey, why don’t I make this official and actually buy a domain name. I am by no means a marketing genius or known for any witty taglines, or things like that. My style tends to be classic, low key, simple with a somewhat dry sense of humor. When reading blogs, and watching YouTube videos they all recommend not spending more than 30 minutes on this and not to “over-think it”. Well, I have gone well past overthinking it and chose the domain name techbyzach.com. This came after many hours of debating whether to use my name, don’t use my name, is my name available, at the time it wasn’t, or should it be more business name like, or lab name like. Like I said, I overthought it very much and finally settled on something that was just “okay” and decided to move forward. It was a dot com address which gave it some validity as opposed to a .net, .ninja, .guru where in my over thinking mind thought those wouldn’t age well.

After finally settling on a domain I was just “okay” with I moved onto my next monumental task, update the theme so that it is modern, and something I am proud of. Since I had previously had my Blogger free blog I decide why not try and reuse that template and maybe update some colors, the theme and make it into more than what I started with back in 2015. As I started to click around the UI with Blogger I soon realized that this undertaking was going to be more than I was prepared for. My website design skills are about as basic as they were when I took a website design class in high school and I had an idea of what I wanted to do visually, just not exactly sure how to get that executed with Blogger’s tools. This was when I realized I should probably look at other hosting sites to get a better idea of what is out there and if it would be any easier than what I was currently working with. On and off for the next few months I looked at some of my other favorite bloggers sites and finally figured out that many use WordPress. So again, here I am going to a new site to see if I they have what I am looking for. I soon found out that the WordPress site offers a lot of customizability and the bar to learn it wasn’t super high and gave it a shot.

Finding a new domain

Now that I found WordPress I thought, why not step up my game and choose a domain that is closer to what you want to REALLY blog about? So here I am in 2020 and as we all know, 2020 was a year to forget and I decided let me create a domain with a bit of wit; wow did that backfire. I chose isthisautomation.com because I wanted a blog around what I was working on at work and truly enjoy, infrastructure automation. What I quickly realized was that the name was awful, I couldn’t even remember it, I kept confusing it with something else and then thought, who in their right mind creates a website in the form of a question anyhow? As I was excited to blog I just couldn’t because the name, at least in my opinion, was so awful that I couldn’t stand behind it. Here I am, with a nice new WordPress site that I was still learning, and a terrible name which made me frustrated as every-time I began working on it.

In my quest to finally get writing I decided here in 2021 to try again to find my name in the .com space, zachthorne.com. In a stroke of luck I typed it in to the WordPress domain search and it turned green. I couldn’t believe it, I thought I had to have mistyped it, misspelt it, or it was going to cost some ridiculous amount to register. After going back and checking four or five times I knew that this was it and checked out as quickly as I could.

FINALLY!!

So here I am, finally a domain name with my name, that will reflect who I am, my personal brand, my experiences and my opportunity to give back to a community who has provided so much to me. It is simple, it is classic, it breaks down the barrier that I had in my head on overthinking what I wanted to do in the first place, blog about technology. I know with my first post I will look back in time and see how absolutely terrible this is, and frankly I do not care. I am finally excited to stake a claim on the interwebs that is for me, by me. A few things I look forward to in sharing is my knowledge in Desired State Configuration, Cloud Native technology, Infrastructure as code, my journey to learn Linux and whatever other musings I may have. If you have made it this far, thank you for your support and Welcome!