First and foremost, I need to say that I am in no way mocking recovery programs with the title of this blog post. I am a huge advocate for addiction recovery, and AA and NA are seriously awesome programs.

That being said, I am an addict. I am addicted to buying Domain names.

I Bought my first domain name in 2005, it was angelastunes.com and it was a space to showcase my music.

As you can see, apologizing for my online absence is a tradition, eight years strong! Also, thanks to the Wayback Machine, I was able to hear songs that I posted back in 2011, which is pretty awesome!

Check this out –> All I Want is You

Since 2005, I have bought an additional 40 domain names! Not all of these domain names were lucky enough to actually turn into sites, in fact only about four ended up being sites, but I had big plans for each and every one of them.

I went through all of my email accounts and old hosting sites to find every domain name that I’ve ever purchased and I’m going to share them all with you, right here, right now.

1. anikay.com – That’s where you are now
2. backtocrunchy.com – This site was to highlight my journey back to a more simple and natural life after the hustle and bustle of corporate America.
   
3. bellsandmasons.com – This site was about dealing with depression and anxiety through art. The bell is a reference to Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and the mason refers to mason jars. Seriously, google mason jar crafts…it’s a thing. I haven’t entirely given up on this one, I love art therapy.
4. copperboombox.com – This is legit one of the best ideas I have ever had. Copper Boom Box is the name of the Gilmore Girls subscription box I was going to create. I am a GG freak, and I had some amazing ideas for this box. Maybe I’ll do it some day, but I barely have time to blog, let alone to start my own online subscription box business. Just so you know, the first box was going to have a Hello Kitty stamp in it, which my die hard fans would have loved!
5. everydayehs.com – This one still exists, though I changed hosting a while back and didn’t export my content. I haven’t had the heart to load the site back up, so it’s been sitting there bare for a while. Also, the Twitter account for this site is followed by Smokey the Bear. So, I mean, do I really need to achieve anything else here?
6. lavendervanillalatte.com – This was going to be my bullet journal and brush lettering site. I didn’t want to jack my Ani Kay site up with all of my bullet journal posts (of which there is currently one), so I planned on having a designated site for it. Turned out, I didn’t do either.
7. mommabearlife.com – This is what this site was called before I realized that I am not a mommy blogger, and didn’t want to write about my kids or mom stuff. I feel like that sounds harsh, but I think that may be mommy guilt.
8. wfhlife.com – Remember when I said I was going to write about being a work from home mom? Well,  I bought this domain name to document my work-from-home journey. Aaaaand I did not make the time to do it.
9. thanikay.com – so this one isn’t actually that interesting, I just bought this domain since all of my social media and email for this blog has ‘the’ in the beginning, if I really take off folks may be tempted to put a ‘the’ in the title when they search for my blog. Always thinking ahead, folks.
10. veganspotting.com – I was really excited about this one, and I almost hired a web designer to help me with it. I wanted it to be a mix of Finding Vegan and Bigger Bolder Baking, I love the way the latter has the section for folks to post their own versions of the recipes on the site.
    
11. wheresthegoodnews.com – I literally just bought this domain name last week. I have been reading so much bad news, and it’s making me crazed. It’s draining, exhausting, and downright depressing. So I decided to start my own news site, with only good news. I wanted to do the Good News Daily, from Gilmore Girls, but the name was taken.
    
    
12. workingonworkingmom.com – ah Working On Working Mom, this blog was my baby. It was the first real blog I ever wrote, and I started it right after having Jack in 2012. I really loved this blog, and learned so much while writing it. This blog taught me how to be a blogger and it made me really feel like a professional writer.
13. foodielight.com – I was trying to eat healthier, and I figured I’d document my journey on this site. I was going to show folks that they could eat healthy while still eating great food! I didn’t succeed in either task.
14. veganinfive.com – Vegan meals either made in five minutes or made with only five ingredients! It had potential.
15. mysocalledpresident.com – Embarrassingly, I bought this domain right after the 2016 election. I honestly thought I was going to write about the presidency, because we took the win pretty hard in this house. I’m glad I didn’t follow through with this one…for many many reasons.
16. copperboomdesigns.com – This one was going to be for my web design business…for after I learned web design. I’ve got lofty goals, y’all!
17. wearethepears.com – this site was another winner in terms of actually becoming a site that people visited! My band was called The Pears, and this is where we posted our videos and gig dates. I started this site with just html code, before I heard of WordPress. You can check out some of the videos here, Hallelujah is my favorite, it starts a little rough, but it gets better, I promise.
18. cookfrombooks.com – I was going for a Julia/Julia type of vibe here. I was going to cook my way through all of my cookbooks, and document it on the blog.
19. writesleeprepeat.com – This was going to be a collaborative site, I even created a survey to send out to all of my blogger friends. The site was going to be about writing, obvs. I kind of love that logo I made for this one.
20. idreamofvegan.com – Another vegan site, there’s only one more after this. I created this one after having a dream about Alton Brown making me a vegan blueberry buckle. I used to watch a lot of Food Network.
21. frommybrain.com – I bought this site for Eric and I to review movies. But we never actually did anything with it.
22. graphsequential.com – I bought this one for Eric, and he actually used it. This is also the site where we published our Smallville Podcast, called Smallville Complete. It was pretty great.
23. thecookingclassroom.com – I don’t remember if this was a site for me to teach cooking or to learn how to cook. Both would have been pretty ambitious goals. Sadly nothing became of this one.
24. assaultandpepper.org – Yikes, so this one is a little dark. I created this site to talk about rape in popular shows like Family Guy, and how it was the topic of so many jokes. I had some good ideas, but never followed through.
25. browniesandbiscuits.com – Two things that I have never been successful at making from scratch are brownies and biscuits. I think I created this one to try to work on that? But I can’t be certain.
26. highlowconsult.com – Another consulting, web design, website.
27. icanmakethishealthier.com – I bet you can guess what this one was going to be about.
28. penletter.com – I actually really loved this idea, it was an online pen-pal program, similar to Facebook, but the connections would be one on one. Looking back on it, I don’t know what made this different than just sending emails back and forth. But, at the time it felt revolutionary.
29. schoolofcrock.com – Another Julia/Julia scenario here. I was going to try to learn how to cook from Betty Crocker recipes.
30. vegancookbookchallenge.com – Again, you can probably guess what this one is about.
31. pinnypencher.com – The tagline for this one was, “when you’re so broke, you can’t afford to spell check”. Now, I was nowhere near being able to give financial advice when I created this site, but I kind of thought I could get out of debt and learn some tricks along the way that I could share with others to help them get out of debt.
32. shesaysnow.com – My online magazine! I was actually inspired by the second season of Girlfriend’s Guide to Divorce on this one. I had big plans for this magazine!
33. getyourishstraight.com – If anyone is qualified to help you get your shit together it is someone who completely does not have their shit together!
34. angelakhill – I have no idea why I created this one. I think it was another web consulting idea.
35. workingonbeingmom.com – I bought this one because when I was writing Working On Working Mom I thought about not ditching the working mom aspect. Working mom blogs are in a smaller niche than the broader mommy blog category, and I wasn’t always certain I wanted to be writing in that small niche.
36. lorelaigilmore.com – I was going to write about how to live like a Gilmore. Click on Lorelai or Rory and you’d get a break down of how to live your most Gilmore life. Did I mention that I’m a bit Gilmore Girls obsessed? I got this one just before Netflix announced they’d be putting out another season of Gilmore Girls, and I was hoping I’d be able to get enough content on it to somehow benefit from the new series. I got zero content on it.
37. ournewfamilysite.com – I got this one when Jack was born, and was going to use it as an online scrapbook for our family. This one also never went anywhere.
38. startrek365.com – I only wrote one post on here, and I wish Wayback Machine had a capture of it! I was going to watch one episode of Star Trek a day and then write about it. I watched one episode and wrote about it.
39. cricketmall.org – This was going to be a site full of links to other sites. I know I know, the lowest common denominator for websites. But, it had a great tagline: Cricket Mall – You’ve gotta cricket before you click it. Come on, that’s a good one!
40. karatechoprobots.com – I bought this one for Eric, for his birthday, to review movies. Sadly, he never used it.

Whew! If you’ve made it this far, you are a trooper and I love you!

So, technically I only bought about 3 domain names a year, which really doesn’t sound that bad. Unless I tell you that I bought three a year for 13 years, then it sounds like I have a problem.

What have I learned from this experience, you ask? Well, I was just about to buy another domain name just before writing this post. I recently applied for an MBA and I’m considering writing about it. But then I reminded myself that I have a bit of a domain name problem, and I can just create a series on this blog if I want to get down to it.

I love this blog, and I love my readers, so I’m going to try to focus on what I’ve got instead of going crazy with all these other ideas. I hope you’ll stick around with me!

Do you collect anything? I call it a collection because it sounds better than addiction. Let’s get real, what are you addicted to?

The post My Name is Ani, and I am a Domain Name Addict – Seriously Y’all I have a Problem appeared first on Ani Kay.