It all started somewhere in August 2011. Me and Somin Wadhwa, a friend who lives nearby, started it since we found it difficult to find applications for Symbian online and we knew people had the same problem as well. So we started a Facebook page for it and posting things. But a couple of weeks later, there was evident news that Symbian is dead, android was taking over it. So we closed the Facebook page, but I still had a knack for creating a page. So I started a Facebook page named Tech4every1, where-in I posted random things about technology and even news. I was this time accompanied by Dhananjay Sarsonia, a college friend. We both wrote posts on the Facebook page and started even making notes so that they were accessible for reading by everyone and they did not have to search through the posts on the page.
We kept on doing so until we realized that this wasn’t working very well and notes were not a good option. So we moved on to a blogger blog where we copied our notes and continued writing. And on December 16, 2011, we started blogging under the branding Tech4every1. Dhananjay could not continue writing for the blog due to personal commitments but I kept doing so.
I kept writing on multiple topics, soon to realize that everyone does news to get exposure but I wasn’t very keen being a curator of technology news, so I shifted to writing only technology tips and tricks. And it has been a hell of a ride since then. I not only improved my English somewhat, but I went on and managed a brand that I created. I did social media for it, on Twitter, Facebook and even Google Plus. I learnt Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques, got to know what keywords are, the relevance to search engines etc. I then migrated the blog from Blogger to WordPress, the main reason being the SEO plugins.
I even came to know about affiliate marketing because of blogging, met people who had been making money using it. Also explored various ad networks apart from adsense. I even got obsessed with the parameters that made a website rank popular, alexa, DMoz, PageRank and optimized excessively for ranking high. And I learnt how to promote Facebook and Google Plus pages and get a good following. I even got an internship at Digit magazine! In short, I learnt a lot from it and this has been an amazing experience. I cannot even write down all the things I learnt from this and the amazing people I have met as a result.
But today, 17th August 2015, exactly 3 years, 8 months and a day later, I am shutting it down. This has been the longest commitment I have ever made to anything in my life, till date, and I am turning the other way now. No, I am not releasing the domain name. Maybe will use the branding for something else some day, but yes, I am removing the blog from the domain.
There are mainly 2 reasons for it. First, I lost access to the Facebook page quite a long time back, around November. I had created a business page for Tech4every1 following the event of the previous one getting unpublished for reasons unspecified by Facebook. I thought that creating it as a brand will make it less prone to the same fate yet again. So, I always used incognito mode to access the page. And once I logged in from a location other than home and the account got blocked. The Facebook team kept bugging me to log in from a device which was used before, and since I used incognito, I did not have any browser which had the stored cookies. I still kept going with the blog anyway.
The second reason is that I had moved to Wisdom Geek on April 6 since I didn’t want to keep writing tech tips and tricks only. I wanted to share my experiences and not just be restricted to the domain of technology. I had decided to let Tech4every1 survive for people who searched for something. But I had tried an ad network as an experiment on it, and forgot to remove it before letting it there in. It led to a redirect loop on the WordPress login page. I could have disabled it using the cPanel but I had it hosted on Azure, so I didn’t have access to the wordpress folders directly. Yes, I can use FTP, or make a SQL database backup of the posts and re-host it somewhere but I am just deciding to let it go now. There is already a malware warning on Google, thanks to the ad network and I am not willing to take the effort of looking into how to solve it. I tried to do it and lingered on to whether to pull the plug or not. But after weeks of thinking I have made the choice. This is a difficult decision but I am going forward with it.
Just wanted to thank a few people for it before removing the whole domain. I was very lucky to have support from different people on various aspects of the journey and many have helped me in the background to keep going so strong for such a long time. So will mention all the names that I can remember and in a few words how they helped. If I forget anyone, I beg your apologies and would love to include the name if you remind me of it.
Thanks people (no particular order):
- Somin Wadhwa (Symbian page)
- Dhananjay Sarsonia (Co-founder)
- Jaspreet Singh (Part of endless discussions and wrote posts too)
- Pranshu Aggarwal (Did lot of things and wrote posts as well)
- Tamanna Selwal (Designing logos/images)
- Adhaar Sood (Logo designer)
- Ritobroto Mandal (Designer)
- Tanmay Patange (Guest blogger)
- Anshul Sharma (Facebook promotion help)
- Aakash Goel (Windows 8 application)
- Yogesh Madaan (Promotion)
- Purnank Jain (Idea generation)
- M.V. Priyank (Guidance and suggestions)
- Aakash Gupta (Designing)
- Rohit Bhatia (Listening to my worries and not providing any solutions)
- Hitesh Ramani (Designing and suggesting things)
- Shrey Malhotra (Suggestions and guidance)
- Mohit Kukreja (Guidance and mentorship)
- Stephanie Schmit (Mentorship)
- Shreya Punj (Editing)
- Vinayak Mehta (Guest blog, and later on competing with Tech4every1)
If I forgot anyone, I am sorry, 3 years is a very long time and there would be many who might have helped me but I simply forgot the names here. Plus I am a bit emotional right now as well. Thanks everyone and I’ll end the post now with a song from portal:
And yes, Tech4every1 would not have been a success without the readers, who made it worth writing. I wouldn’t have taken off if it had not been for you. THANK YOU!
