What it took to get here.
I told myself that when I was satisfied with the website that i had built, that I would write this post. That time has come. Most people think that building a custom website with a custom domain is really easy. To some extent they are right. It all starts with an idea. A vision. A driving factor which makes you want to do something. In this case, my driving factor was college, expression, growth and freedom. I told my father, that I wanted to start blogging. He was ecstatic. A few days passed, and I had gotten the raw code for my website, and I went to my dad, and we had the following discussion Me:
Father... The time has come. Father: ... what? Me: The domain father. It is time to purchase it. Father: Ok, how much? Me: Not much, just 2k inr Father: Let's talk tomorrow Me: ...
The hard part had just started. Convincing my father to drop 2 thousand rupees on a domain, which he considered a good investment. Someday in late July, I officially became the proud owner of vihaanvaghela.com! Unbeknownst to me, my happiness would translate into its equivalent weight in mental torture in just 13 hours after the purchase of the domain... I used to think that building a website and deploying it would be simple as simple as buying the domain and pasting the .zip file of your repo, so that the website can unzip it and run it. It was indeed not that easy... Then reality arrived. Buying the domain was the easy part. I had to change nameservers. Learn what DNS even was. Import everything into Cloudflare. Connect it to Vercel. Watch builds fail. Read logs I barely understood. Fix one thing. Break another. Then came VERCEL_API_KEY. 😂 I had no idea what an environment variable was before this project. One missing environment variable was enough to stop the entire deployment. I never thought a single line of configuration could keep an entire website offline. Nineteen hours later... it finally deployed.
vihaanvaghela.com, the first step to growth, existed. I jumped up and down, for 5 minutes constant and let out a war cry so feral that Genghis Khan himself, from the clouds above would be shocked. My entire community came out of their houses to see what happened or who fell down the stairs and broke their arm 😂.
Though my website was not merely adequate in my eyes, it was a website for that matter. To this day, I continue to iterate, every single day and make the most of my 5 hour claude code session, I have some more ideas like making pip dance and make a feature called pip radio, which is basically my coding and writing playlist. I am also planning on creating a seperate tab for short for content, like threads or x but just giving a generic name like posts, and the long form being called articles. Tomorrow I am also planning to make a seperate tab for vihaanvaghela.com/os, which is basically my current system settings for my body, like mental state, mindset, and model number 😂. Right now I am on version 14.813.97 (Years old.Percentage of time covered till my next birthday.Mental wellbeing).
I do rather see some improvement from my previous article in this, and I hope to continue seeing growth, for that is one of the core purposes of the website.
-Vihaan Vaghela