easy town projects
Events before the pre-launch-diary
How it all started
Timeline
6 January 2022
My hosting service announces price rise
25 February 2022
I register towns and cities international
7 March 2022
New websites marathon
7 March 2022
By 23:37 the last domain was set up
12 October 2022
In January 2022 I got an email from my hosting provider informing me about a price rise. To sweeten the deal, they offered additional inclusive domains.
Back in January I didn’t pay any attention to this, but by the end of February an idea was taking shape: what if I used the eight new domains to split the content of the single easy town website and give the future easy town projects their own website?
I got hooked on the idea and registered towns-and-cities-international.org as a first test.
And then I made a plan. The new domains would become available on the seventh of March. By noon that day I had registered all additional domains, by the afternoon they were all connected and that night they each got a clone of the original website — as starting point.
I wouldn’t do it the same way again, but I remember how great it felt to have established the basis for eight new websites in one go. No wonder, I thought that nothing could stop me now, and that I would easily complete all websites by the first of April.
Oh, the first of April. That would have been a perfect day for the launch. A year in the easy town story always starts on the first of April. I chose the day to add a bit of ease and playfulness to the story. So launching the new websites on the first of April would have been fantastic. Today, I know that this was never realistic — for an unexpected reason, to be fair.
Before the day of multi-website-connecting, I mapped out what I wanted to do with each website. And that plan was relatively realistic.
What I hadn’t counted on was that once the ideas got out of the crammed space of a single website, they unfolded.
Take the website for dot.international. It was to have a short introduction and a scene from book 1, beginning. Only that short introduction turned into a tour of the idea, plus a lot of colourful graphics. And that tour inspired another tour, this time for the book stations, a website that was to have nothing more than a landing page, and which is now one of the bigger websites with heaps of ideas for the future of books. And so on …
Each idea, once it had the space and its colours and graphics, became bigger and clearer.
And today, I am simply proud and happy about everything that has taken shape over the last months, so much of which might never have seen the light of day, if my hosting provider hadn’t increased the prices and offered the additional domains.
It’s strange how some things come about.
