A warm welcome to everyone who stumbled upon my little site.
I've been working on a self-employed basis developing web projects for many years, and it was always my intention to have a proper showroom for my own projects.
However, time passed, life happened, and I never really got around to making my own site.
I was also quite satisfied with occasionally writing a post over on the (now defunct) ifloop blog, which portrayed a bunch of projects I developed with good friends.
Since me and my friends pretty much abandoned ifloop, however, it was definitely time to make my own home on the web.
Why x and y?
With most of the projects I had developed, I didn't really have a company name or brand that I could use. It also wasn't really necessary, as I was self-employed and usually got offered new projects based on word-of-mouth and other forms of direct recommendations.
However, when I reached the point of buying a domain for myself, i started to think about a few things I always recommended to my clients.
- The shorter a domain, the better
- The shorter a domain, the shorter their associated E-Mails, the better
- Make it easy to remember
- Make it easy to pronounce and spell
- Avoid double letters
- Avoid hyphens
Well, that shouldn't be too hard, right?
When you've been working under your own name for years, and your own name is Alexander Leonhartsberger-Schrott, things suddenly become complicated.
After numerous branding attempts I remembered a nickname that sort of stuck with me since my childhood, "Xandi". My uncle and lots of other relatives used to call me Xandi, and lo and behold, it fit most of the criteria mentioned above.
So I just swapped out the "i" with a "y" and had a short brand name that happened to also mesh well with digital designs and web development (x and y usually signifying coordinates).
Decisions, decisions,...
Having worked on quite a few wordpress projects, I was reluctant to choose it for my own site.
Sure, wordpress has all the plugins, decent themes, and it's the most used CMS on the web, but it's also quite a bloated mess in many ways, and dusty and old in many other ways.
After a fairly decent experience with Ghost on the ifloop blog , I decided to use it again. It's still as crispy, fast and fun as I remembered it, so I can certainly recommend it to anyone who likes node.
For hosting, I picked Digitalocean mainly because I simply wanted to try it out after stumbling upon it a few times. So far, no complaints and a very straightforward setup.
More Content?
Since this blog is brand new, I'm gonna have to add some more content to it in the coming weeks. Please stay tuned and enjoy what's here in the meantime, and if you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact me.