The End of the Affair

No, this has nothing to do with the 1994 movie starring Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore. Or with a real affair for that matter. It’s about the old site I previously maintained for more than 5 years. Programira.me, the site that is no more.

The story of Programira.me

I started programira.me with the intention to grow it into the main site for the Macedonian IT community. A gathering place for IT professionals. A place where people would go to read but also to create original content. The two limitations I self-imposed on the site were that content had to always be free and that it had to be original content written in Macedonian. Copy-paste or translations was something that I would not allow. The number of sites that offered that same kind of content in Macedonian was (and still is) slim to none, I thought it had to be a success.

Unlike a lot of things done in Macedonia I decided everything I do with programira.me to be legal and by the book. I bought a theme, I bought all the plugins, I even bought stock images for the posts, I ordered a logo and then I started writing content.

That was my first obstacle. Writing content in Macedonian, however strange it may sound, did not come easy to me. It took me a lot of time to put together and edit even the simplest text. Plus it all had to be original content because that was the main premise of the whole site. It took time. And that made me inconsistent. In the 5 years I maintained the site not once I managed to consistently produce content in a period of time. So the fact that people didn’t visit the site regularly didn’t really surprise.

Me not being surprised didn’t make me less disappointed though. And disappointment made me want to write even less. I didn’t earn any money from the site so every time I had something work related to do it always had precedence. At the same time the money that I was loosing and that I invented weren’t so much that I felt like I had to make it work. My biggest disappointment was that not only I failed to be a prolific author, no one else wanted to contribute to the site as well. There wasn’t even ‘C’ from the Community I envisioned. I just didn’t know how to sell the idea. In the mean time the Macedonian IT community grew pretty strongly in the form of Dacebook groups. Unfortunately I’ve already lost faith in programira.me to use those channels for promotion.

The battle was lost.

The end

After a longer period of inactivity, unpaid hosting bills, and complete disappointment in my ability to make the site work, I decided to terminate it. I closed my hosting account and decided not to renew the programira.me domain. It was quick and easy death.

Igorski.co

The idea of the Igorski (sur)name came as a joke. Me and my wife jokingly decided that we will change our children’s (to be) surnames to Igorski because ours are just to plain. But somehow I really liked the sound of it, and decided to stick with that joke name.

This new site, unlike the old one, has no mission, no vision. Nothing. Tabula rasa. It should be a journal of experiences. Work related, technology related, but also life, travel, photography related experiences. A true web log. And while both it’s form and function are a bit vague to me now, one thing I am sure of. I plan to make Igorski.co into one hell of a good exercise in consistency.