7 Years

I think I was sitting in a class at Hamline when I actually registered it.

Today marks 7 years since I registered mitchellhislop.com. Though it now just redirects to this site, mph.io, it marked the beginning of a journey that led directly to where I am today.

I was two months into my college career and decided it would be cool to own a domain—mostly because I wanted my own email address. Using Google Apps, I secured mitchellhislop.com. Setting up Google Apps was easy enough for someone "techy" like I was at the time. I read a few articles, did some searches, and made the MX record changes with my fingers crossed. Since that went well enough, I soon found myself on WordPress.com, starting the first iteration of this site.

That led to wanting to self-host WordPress, which led to wanting to learn more about development and system administration. It gave me a home to test out online marketing experiments. Flash forward, and it snowballed into jobs, a career, speaking engagements, and surprisingly strong opinions on protocols like DNS (which I firmly believe will cause the death of the Internet at some point).

Now, the email goes to FastMail (as a bastion of non-Google in my life), and the site is hosted on Squarespace, in what was a near-complete blowout of old writing. I still have it all, sitting in Markdown-formatted text files, but I think it may just stay there. I've been struggling with what to do with it all. It represents my "teenage years" of the internet, where I was a college kid trying way too hard to make a name for myself online. Now, as that name turns seven, I find myself more content in my own niche. This site is a collection of me—some business, some pleasure, some opinions and ramblings, and some sharing of things that inspire me or that I just think are cool.

This site has been through a lot of iterations on quite a few platforms. Off the top of my head:

WordPress.com
WordPress.org
Tumblr.com (still found at tumble.mph.io)
Octopress
Jekyll
Ghost
Squarespace (considered Grav, Tumblr, Octopress, and WordPress before deciding on Squarespace)

I like not self-hosting this site. I have various services backing up my writing, so I don't have many concerns over a third-party being the front-end. It lets me devote the time I used to spend worrying about my setup and tinkering with configs to actually writing or even getting off the internet. I'm not in a development role right now, and I have no real need for an always-on server. Personal sites shouldn't be a burden.

The Name Change

I've always loved my initials. I've long had a theory that they at least influenced my name choice—my dad was a mechanic for 20 years before he went into technology. I knew that I would never be able to snag mph.com, so I settled on mitchellhislop.com and kept my eye out for opportunities. I grabbed mph.name when it came up in a search, but nothing else really fit what I was looking for. Then, on May 6th, I saw a thread on Hacker News about .io TLDs being treated as top-level domains and found out that mph.io was available. I immediately jumped on it and ended up in this multi-site setup where I had mph.name hosting a flat HTML site that was a pseudo business card, and mph.io, which pointed to my Ghost blog.

After considering it for a while, I decided to go all-in on mph.io. It really is the perfect domain for me. I've now got just my one home online—the central hub for my digital self.

(Would I ever make a run at mph.com if I made stupid money? In a heartbeat.)