Hello, and welcome to Decluttering Diaries! I really wanted to start with clothes, but I haven’t made a dent in the clothes because I’ve been preoccupied with digital projects such as the rebrand of Crunchy Family and the launching of my smoothie recipes blog that’s all about giving the finger to diets.

In recent years, I’ve worked to decrease the number of domains own. Since sharing my domainography in 2013, I’ve tried and failed to keep track of subsequent domain statistics so I could do another post like it in the future. I’m not that concerned, even if it was an interesting set of numbers to look at and reflect on (and other people seemed fascinated by it, too).

Current domains:

1. jane.fyi – I was originally going to drop this one, but I ultimately decided to keep it and drop effys.space instead (see below). jane.fyi forwards to git.jane.fyi. I decided to keep it and use it like so because I love how it’s short. It’s one of those “premium” domains that are rare to get, and I was shocked when I first went to register it that a Jane Doe of a name was available! go.jane.fyi is hooked up to my Bitly account as my personal branded domain, a much better choice than jane.fyi because anyone could have added any subdomain at jane.fyi for their personal branded domain, with the CNAME and A Record settings as they were.
2. hej.gay – As this is for my blog, I’m obviously keeping it?? So no comment.~
3. smoothiesbycolor.com, smoothiesbycolour.com – For my new blog. See, international brands go to the food expos I go to, plus it seems North America is the only place that actively excludes the u from words with our. It was logical to me to register the alternate spelling of Smoothies by Color to avoid confusion.

Dropped domains:

• 6birds.net – Something I always used to say was, “You’ll always be able to find me at 6birds.net!” In a way, I think it’s my way of not being forgotten. On the other hand, I feel no attachment to it and keeping up with past relationships I had under a different identity feels too futile to keep up with it. I’ve renewed it for its final year and will try to contact people who still link to it with requests for them not to link to it anymore. As it’s the root domain for my account, I’ll sort that mess out later (last time we tried to make hej.gay the root domain, there were issues). I no longer care much if it goes to spam or pørn or something.The person who registered and blogged at the domain for so long isn’t me anymore; holding onto it makes me feel obligated to be her.
• byjane.me – I registered this via NameCheap for $0.99 because I liked the idea of putting “by Jane” on things and showing off my ish. I even hooked it up to my Github Pages repository before deciding against that usage and undoing everything. jane.fyi was near and dear to me; nothing compared to it, so I renewed it and decided to forgo byjane.me. jane.fyi has a sassiness that cannot be replaced by another domain.
• effys.space – This was hard, because I was using it for online trading card games! However, I have since put the TCG notice page on Jane, FYI. It dawned on me that I’d rather just register a dedicated domain for my main TCG when the time comes around for it, rather than worrying about keeping up with it via a subdomain of a domain I felt obligated to keep despite wanting to let it go.

Overview

At present, excluding let-go domains, I own 4 domains. I’m approaching Smoothies by Color as a business rather than a hobby blog, so I’m not sure whether it’s necessary to include its two domains in my tally. I’m also keen to count it as 1 and say my total owned domains is 3, because the spelling variation was an inevitable variable I didn’t consider until after the fact—by which I was already attached to the name, because it is a name that also defines the blog. I mean, smoothies—by color. It’s like if you switched around “color by number” or “paint by number” and changed it to smoothies. I feel like such a genius over it, because it’s one of those rare moments when my intelligence comes up with something that’s actually useful rather than just laughing at its own fart jokes.

I THINK I’VE COME A LONG WAY.

I always envisioned a life wherein I owned less than 10 domains—that was my goal, because it felt so impossible. Soon I owned 9, then 8, dwindling down to 5. I’m quite pleased with myself!

In the past, I spent so much time running away from my problems. I thought forcing new identities onto myself would resolve everything, or at least protect me, but it only added to my issues—my stress, my frustrations, my bills. In the long run, it’s less expensive to renew a domain that costs more than registering a new one. Why? Because of SEO, for one (obviously); but also because a new domain means you’re starting from the beginning, even if you move over your previous posts. You have to rebrand, and you have to be careful. You have to tell everyone about it, and they’re usually curious about why you changed domains again. In all my running, I never stopped to think why I was running or about the problems my running away caused and fueled. By running away from my problems instead of facing them head-on, I added fuel to the fire. I compromised small pieces of myself until I had no more pieces left—just to appease people who would never be happy with me.

I no longer identify myself by the number of domains I own. For this reason, I can justify spending money on a domain registration for a longtime hobby (oTCGs) so I needn’t worry about adhering it to a more personal identity. For this reason, I blog about whatever the fuck I want on my blog. For this reason, my blog is Janepedia. For this reason, I’m at peace with my decluttering decisions.

How many domains do you own? How do you feel about owning many? Have you ever been super attached to one that you struggled to release into the wild?