Yesterday was election day in Estonia and the results are in, which is why I remembered that one time I looked at my website on the Wayback Machine.

This domain used to point to a Wordpress site that hosted content for a candidate in the local elections, at least around 2011-2014.

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For international readers: “Õunapuu” is a relatively common last name in Estonia. Special characters in domains weren’t that widely adopted back then, which is how you end up using “Ounapuu”.

The site is political in nature and a quick glance at the writing reveals that the text is… interesting, to put it nicely.

After 2014, things seem to have changed as the blog did not get any new posts and at some point the domain was not renewed. Around 2017 I registered the domain because a friend recommended that I get myself a domain, because personal domains are cool. Best move I’ve made in my career, especially as I later heard from a colleague that someone else with the same last name was asking about this domain name and wanted to register it in their name.

The site has gone through some changes. It used to host a super basic page that referred to my work, and it also linked to a blog that never quite took off. It did eventually, but not in that form.

The setup that you’re looking at right now was established in 2020. I ended up taking a ready-made Hugo theme and tweaking it to my liking.

And that’s pretty much it. I didn’t expect this domain to have much history, but thanks to the Internet Archive we have records of it.

Here’s to hoping that I don’t forget to renew the domain!