This domain is an oddballA blog post by Jesse Luoto

The story of this domain name; thejunkland.com, and how it came to be.

The domain wasn't meant to be a personal blog in the first place. I registered it for a game prototype I was developing at the time.

The main game was much like Monopoly, just more boring. You'd grind a corporate job in a capitalistic environment where it would be painful to get any extra money at all. You'd probably be balancing with credit card debt to get the ends meet.

At some point of the game you'd be given a chance to do something mildly illegal for a moderate pay – take a step tp the dark side.

The game would then transform completely: You'd try to keep a day job to not raise suspicions, but go full criminal on your free time. From a boring corporate job to avoiding law enforcement and climbing the criminal organization ladder.

And the game's name:
The Junkland

And what's the first thing you do when you start a new side project? Of course you buy the domain!

As many side projects, the game didn't see the light of the day. I've probably lost the prototype too.

A few months later it was time for me to start my first tech blog. I still had thejunkland.com laying around, so I thought I'd save a few bucks and reuse the domain

Fast forward 10 years, and the site has been my best performing blog/portfolio. I think I got a couple of blog posts to HN front page too.

I also have hundreds of people on my mailing list through that blog. Unfortunately I've not been an active blogger for a quite a long time.

And now, after 10 years, I'm rebuilding the site from scratch. A lot has changed (cannot even add new pages anymore since npm packages from 10 years ago have ceased to work) let's see how it goes.

Edit: I made it! The site is up and modernized. No more Grunt.js, and atomatic deploys + package updates.

Tweet

Be the first to know from new blog posts

Subscribe to the mailing list to get priority access to new blog posts!