Blaugust Day 8 — TGTCML: Blogging at Sygnus.org

This is part of the Blaugust series!

This short series of The Game That Changed My Life (TGTCML) leads from the discovery of my first JRPG and traces all the way up to my current blog, Sygnus.org. Sygnus.org is a domain I registered in 2001, back when I bought my first website hosting package and moved away from free-hosted sites.

It was such an exciting time to own your own domain! The prices of domains were just starting to drop (they used to be super expensive), and I wanted a place to connect my forums, play by email community, FFIV fan site, personal web projects and anything else that I created. Sygnus.org, named after a fantasy element in my writing, became that hub page, but rarely served as much more than that.

Over the years, I’ve tried to break into blogging over and over again. I’ve made creative blogs, writing blogs, webcomic blogs, random blogs. I even tried blogging around the ebooks I published. But none of it seemed to stick, gain much traction or attention and I ended up letting the blogs fall by the wayside.

This is not the first time I installed WordPress on Sygnus.org. I don’t even remember the name of the blog, but it was another fail, and I quit blogging on WordPress for a while. I gravitated to Tumblr a bit, and found some success in blogging at my White Charr and Snaff Savant Guild Wars 2 fan Tumblrs. Though I fell out of the GW2 fandom, I learned a bit about what it takes to connect to a fan community from that experience.

I have no idea what nudged me back into blogging at Sygnus.org, or why it stuck this time, but I re-launched the WordPress blog on January 16, 2014. I didn’t know exactly what I was going to focus on, so I just left it wide open as a gaming and geek blog. As it started to gravitate more toward gaming than other topics, I decided to give it a new name: Clean Casuals.

At first, I considered moving the blog to a new domain (I do own cleancasuals.com), but I saw that would take a lot of work, and Google search results seem to favor my 14-year-old Sygnus.org domain. So, even though the domain does not match the blog name, I’ve left it as it is. It’s funny, though, that in letting the blog remain on Sygnus.org, it is by extension connecting it back to that first JRPG discovery and all the artistic legacy that came before it.

So maybe, in the end, that’s just fine.

Comments