My 2022 went great. I learned so much in this awesome year. It is time to bid 2022 farewell and welcome the new year 2023. Today is 28th December 2022, and only three days are left until the end of this year. I randomly got a thought in my mind to write a 2022 recap a few days ago but I was too lazy to work on it. It is 9 AM IST today, I just woke up 15 minutes ago and decide to write this article. So here is my 2022 recap.

Edit: It's 29th December 2022. I did not get time to complete the article yesterday (actually I was watching The Blacklist).

Currently, it's 11:45 AM IST on day 2. Two days to the new year.

Let's start with January: the busiest month

Our final exams are usually conducted from mid-February to the end of the month so, almost everyone starts preparation for the exams a month before. I also started my preparation during this time in 2021. I was studying 7 hours a day, most of the time doing maths because from what I recall half of the syllabus was pending in mathematics. Every second moment I thought this time I was going to perform worst in my favourite subject (yes, I like maths, my father likes math, my grandfather like maths). The relationship between maths and my family members was weird. You will not believe it but everyone, EVERYONE in my family was good at maths.

I have heard in movies and from my school peers that people fear maths. I never felt it, maybe because of my maths-loving genes. I never felt that fear until last year. I experienced the pressure when I have only one month left and have to complete 5-6 chapters on my own. You may be wondering what I was doing at school. Well, at that time we had online classes so, I never attended one.

Somehow, I manage to complete the syllabus and also scored good marks on the exam, rest story is for another time for now let's move to the next months. I don't want this article to be excessively long.

February: nothing to talk about

All the ICSE school conducts final exams in February so, it was the time when I was completely disconnected from the online world. I did nothing except read textbooks tens-hundreds of times. This time my exams ended before the end of February as they were started early because there was a risk of again spreading of covid-19.

Then, the Russia-Ukraine war started. Well, I am not sharing my views on it as Google Adsense prohibits publishers to justify the war (Oh God! These Americans think they are the only one who runs the world). At that time even now Twitter was flooded with people from India supporting Putin. Let's not talk about that and move to the next part.

After the exams were over, I usually spent my whole day reading about the war. I have never experienced such war on a large scale before so I was very much curious about it.

March: the most productive month

After exams, we usually have a month-long holiday. During this time I thought about creating this website. At that time I had a free .ml domain registered through freenom. I thought a free domain and Github page hosting would be enough to set up a blog where I can publish my learning.

I always wanted to document my learning and everything happening in my life so that people may read them and would learn something from them. I was inspired by famous personalities who wrote diaries at their time and now people are reading them and learning from their mistakes.

I had a freenom .ml domain which I registered back in July 2021. Previously, I hosted it on Infinityfree then I switched to Github Pages. I was publishing high-value quality content regularly but to my surprise, nothing was ranking on Google. I did all sorts of SEO tricks but nothing worked.

After reading multiple articles, I could not find the reason why my website was completely missing from Google. Not a single post was ranking on Google except the homepage. I also gathered hundreds of quality backlinks from big websites like Hackernoon and Amazon but that too didn't work.

During the whole month of March, I was figuring out how to make my website appear in Google searches. I used almost every technology to build a blog from Infinityfree to Blogger to Github pages but nothing worked. I had published tons of programming articles. I soon learned that Google does not trust these free domains and sees them as untrustworthy. It was the reason why my website wasn't ranking on Google although it had high-quality content. It was demotivating for me. I was so sad that I wasted so many days solving this problem and at last when I found the answer I couldn't do anything much about it.

It felt so bad on wasting hundreds of hours of my life. I decided to take a break and focus on my studies. For the next few months, I devoted myself completely to my studies. I couldn't write articles but I can read. So I started reading news and ebooks. It helped a lot. In my free time (which I barely get), I would read articles to read articles and ebooks.

I have school five days a week and believe me they are horrible. Let me tell you my routine which I repeat every day. Sometimes I feel like I am inside a loop. I am currently having my Winter Holidays. I am feeling so relieved. I couldn't imagine going back to that loop again when my school will start, following the same schedule every day. It's like being in hell.

I would get up at 5 AM. Get ready, spend 6 hours at school, come back at 2 PM, fell on the bed and be asleep as if I am dead. My parents get so much worried about my sleeping style. I would wake up at 6 PM for tuition, and come back at 8. I always feel so tired like I have no energy at all. I would then watch some YouTube. I would then sit for studying after dinner till midnight and then again fall asleep.

This is my everyday routine for 5 days a week (6, when I have school on Saturday, which I usually have).

So, for the next five months, I was busy with my studies. Let's skip to September.

September: got really good ideas

As I told you before, in my free time I used to read news articles. I was inspired by those news articles and wanted to write my own, but there should I write. I am sure no news publication is gonna give a job to an underage. So, I decided to build my news publication.

I started to read about how to write a news article on the Internet and was able to learn lots of things in such a short time of a month.

I took a break from my studies and shifted my focus again to the world of tech.

October: the start of mayankvikash.in

I asked my parents to buy me a domain as I couldn't afford one. I went to GoDaddy and decided to buy a .in domain. The reason for selecting a .in over .com was that when looking online I found that the ccTLD (country-code Top Level Domain) for china is .ch which has over 25 million registrations, according to Statista. .tk has the most registrations but it is a free domain so we will not consider it. On the other hand, India's .in TLD has only 3 million registrations. That is why I chose .in for creating my website.

I got it from GoDaddy for 700 Rs. including taxes.

The whole month of October was spent setting up my website and creating themes and doing other sorts of things. First, I only published programming articles.

November: Started the news publication

In November, I decided to start a news publication. I created sitemap.xml and rss.xml on my own and still manage them without any automation. I added a few news publications. I usually cover tech news as other tech publications are busy publishing paid phone reviews.

I managed this website all alone along with my studies and I am glad to say that I performed well in both.

December: time to attract readers

I decided to earn some money from my website so, I applied for Adsense and got accepted within 6 hours. But, I didn't want my website to fill with ads as it messes up the UI of my site. Monetizing my site was also morally wrong as I am using a free service to host my site so I decided to not show ads till I bring some readers to my website and switch to paid hosting (most preferably Hostinger).

I am also thinking of launching my app next year so currently learning Android Studio. I am having difficulties learning the weird Java that Android Studio uses, I am learning and online tutorials are helping a lot. Thanks to FreeCodeCamp and the video guy who made the tutorial.

Thanks for reading my 2022 recap I forgot to mention it's day 3 of writing this article.

It is one of the longest articles I have written. Let me know on Twitter if it was useful to you and whether you learned something or not.

I will soon publish my 2023 goals on mayankvikash.in. Till then have a great time!