Hey E, welcome to the hidden oasis I’ve created. My intention for this place is for a place for me to write out my thoughts and learnings without the fear of public scrutiny. I’ve shared this website with you because I trust you, and I feel that you’re the kind of person that can engage with what I write in a meaningful manner.
I’ve toiled with the idea of this website for a while now. I found that a large form of writers block that stopped me from sitting down and actually writing my thoughts out is this unconscious pressure of an anonymous stranger coming across this place.
There’s actually a term for this feeling: context collapse. Fundamentally, context collapse is the idea that when one posts something on the public internet, that their words contain the potential to be discovered and scrutinized by the entirety of the internet (which at this point is basically everyone in the developed world and parts of the developing world). This leads one to craft their writing to appeal to the least common denominator; to walk on metaphorical eggshells to avoid the harshness of strangers yelling at them online.
My original plan was to create a website under a pseudonym and throw it out there in the public internet. But even that idea gave me this feeling that I had to perform—that my writing had to be perfect and bulletproof, lest I face the wrath of public criticism. Even though I know the odds of an actual person coming across my random website, reading it, and publicly criticizing it are pretty much close to zero, my mind didn’t like that possibility and I found it unconsciously blocking me.
So I figured, why not create a “hidden oasis” of sorts? A website that exists on the internet, but is designed on purpose to be hidden from external eyes?
So what does it mean for this website to be “hidden”? You were able to type the URL for this website in your browser and now you’re here—what’s stopping the rest of the world from finding out about this place? There’s technical things one can do to tuck away their website from the indexing of search engines and prevent public discovery. I wrote a post with more detail about how I hid this place. The most important takeaway is that having the URL of this website in your head, https://hiddenoasis.vip, are the coordinates to come to this place and the coordinates are deliberately hidden from the public.
Why the URL hiddenoasis.vip?
I really liked the word oasis, as it signals a place of peace and reprieve tucked away from the chaos of the rest of the world. The
.viptop level domain (TLD) was relatively cheap at $15/year and I feel that it fits the exclusive nature of this site perfectly.
I consider this website a deeply personal place. I actively want to keep the people who know about this place to people I truly trust. For now E, you’re the only person on this island besides me.
A nice thing about my background with software development is that I can tweak any part of this place to my liking. Since you’re my only audience at the moment, let me know if there’s anything you want that would make your experience here more pleasant, and I can most likely do it.
So please take a look around, hope you like it here :-)
- J
