Week 339 was posted by Charanjit Chana on 2024-04-24.
A couple of years ago I kicked off a project that had been sat swirling around in my head for about 10 years. Then last month I let the domain expire.
The real driver for inmyb.io was a service that anyone could use to really hone the SEO side of their online presence. Rather than just a single website, it was supposed to be a guided approach to how to define your various online personas. For a physical business (think local barbers or restaurants) you could also share opening and closing times and eventually things like price lists or menus.
I experimented with linked data quite a bit and found that the implementation from search engines was there. I could help local businesses really improve their online presence when their local community was searching for them. As long as you used the service and published the information that was suggested then eventually "when does the corner shop close" would return snippets of useful information.
But I never got that far, initial focus was on building out a bio page that you could link to in your social media profile. Got a tiny bit of traction, but didn't have the time or energy to put into marketing and as my ability to work on it faded so did my appetite.
If you want to see the end output, you can see the cached version of @cchana over on archive.org.
What next?
As I mentioned, the domain has expired. The project is dead and the idea no longer occupies my mind. The knowledge is there so if I ever help a local business in the future with their website or online presence then I know what to put forward as useful content for them.
Related, but completely separate is the social media links page I put together for myself. It's a comprehensive list of links to my online presence. It was intended to be the landing page for cchana.dev but instead I now forward to my personal site. I might switch it all around, but happy with where it is and the purpose it serves for now.
My biggest takeaway from it all was that infrastructure is an absolute pain. Email handing, hosting, scaling, caching and everything else gets in the way of writing code. It's part of the reason I took a step back from development. I love writing code, I even enjoy maintaining it but I don't really like all of the other stuff that gets in the way.
That will change, I'm sure, in the coming months and years. But for now, inmyb.io is dead.
Tags: development, linked data, web