Yet another human being sees fit to register a place for himself on the internet. But why doesn't he create a website for himself in the space of his ISP? Why doesn't he use any of the dozens of free alternatives like myspace or facebook, and what's up with this domain name? What does onikudaki mean anyway?

Why now?

That one is simple. Over the years, I've contributed articles to the haiku project (called OpenBeOS in that day). I've written articles for www.codeproject.com. I've written articles on a shortlived website which I managed myself. I've written articles on my first blog over on www.msmvps.com....

Over the years, I've left my digital footprint across several places. The thing is... I value the content I've written. Most of it is technical, still useful today, and I've sunk a great deal of time into writing them. But sadly, none of those articles (barring the ones over at my msmvps blog) are under my control anymore. If I want to be sure that I still have them in a couple years time, I'll have to keep copies of everything as local files. This is kinda stupid. But I have to, because I don't trust those other places to stay alive or make decent backups.

I've also encountered times when I wanted to make corrections or minor changes to my articles, only to discover that this is not feasible because I'd have to contact actual people / administrators and badger them into making those changes. And in some cases, uploading content can be cumbersome to begin with. I know that at www.codeproject.com it was a multi step process and involved either sending an article to an editor for processing, or formatting it in raw html myself.

Recently I've begun blogging about my martial arts practice, and that blog is also on a site that charges a fee to get bloggin access. Now I don't mind paying, but if I ever want to leave, there is no easy way to take my content with me, and updating it is also not an option if I should stop paying.

So I finally decided to carve out a small niche for myself here, so that I can keep control over all of my content in 1 central place.

Why here?

First we have to define where 'here' is.

The physical 'Here' means on a server in a professional datacenter, managed by ITSGCorp. Hosting is their business. They don't make money of advertising to me, they don't make money by selling my profile info to 3d parties. No, they make money by being a good and reliable host. Facebook, myspace and all the other places where people can get their digital fix, exist not for the benefit of their members ('cattle' would be a more accurate word). Their business is targeted advertising and selling your private data. And I don't want that.

The logical 'Here' means my domain name. By registering my own domain name, I can move to a different hosting company (should I ever want to do that), take all of my content with me and most of the public links will keep working.

By making those 2 decisions, I am no longer tied to a hosting company, or a publisher, and my content remains under my control while at the same time not having to worry about what other companies are using my private information for.

Why onikudaki?

Several reasons actually.

First of all, in this day and age, getting a good domain name can be challenging. mylastname.(com/be/net/...) is taken, all obvious names are taken. for laughs I just typed in www.brunosplace.com and guess what, that's taken as well. So I decided early on to just go with something geeky / weird / absurd or all of the above.

Onikudaki is a Japanese name for a martial arts technique. Interestingly, the name can be translated several different ways which mean opposing things. Kinda like the Japanese language itself, it depends on context and interpretation. Valid interpretations include 'Destroying the Demon', 'Destroying Demons', 'The Destroying Demon', and 'Demonic Destruction'.

The technique itself made a lasting impression on me when my arm was nearly ripped from the shoulder socket during a martial arts demo in which I was the uke (the one who gets his ass kicked). After thinking about different possible domain names for a while, onikudaki floated to the top of the list and it was geeky enough that I decided to go with that.

Sadly, the .com and .net domains were already taken. For a moment I thought about coming up with a different name but since the .be domain was still available, I decided to go with that.

What will happen now?

Over the next weeks, I'll upload all existing content which is relevant in my opinion: blog posts and articles related to programming or system administration, , my martial arts blog, etc. At the same time I'll configure the layout of this site to my liking and from then onwards, I'll use this site as my main platform for making content available.