A Domain Bought Between Cancelled Trains

Human story

I was meant to go Coventry then Euston, which sounds almost civilised if you don’t look too closely, but the railway had other ideas. First it was Nuneaton, then Northampton, then another cancellation and suddenly I was standing in that awful little pocket of time between Nuneaton and Rugby, hoping for a slow train to London and trying not to laugh at the sheer theatre of it all.

Somewhere in the middle of that nonsense I bought www.altbod.live, because apparently if the universe is going to fling me around the Midlands like a gothic shopping trolley I may as well come out of it with a domain name. I’m Bod, 58, twenty years sober, visibly alt-bi and not hiding. At that point I was equal parts train wreck and delighted little demon.

By the time I was on the train to London I had done the important survival rituals: Reading, Duolingo and buying my ticket for NecroscopE. Very me, really. Coffee would have completed the holy trinity but even without it the evening had that particular charge of being slightly feral and weirdly triumphant.

Then I started building the thing from my phone. Not in some polished studio with a big monitor and a smug chair, but wedged into the journey itself, using the scraps of time between stations to turn a domain purchase into a proper home. That’s the kind of glamour I respect: a girly boy in transit, making a website while the railway sulks.

So this is the origin story before Slimelight, before the later party sweat and eyeliner and floor vigilance. It began with cancelled trains, a spontaneous domain purchase and me refusing to wait for a better moment. The better moment was already here, rattling down the line with me.

Geek notes

The launch started with a simple static site decision. AltBod had a fresh domain and no application structure yet, so the first deploy replaced the default Plesk holding page with a single dependency-free HTML file with inline CSS and a small progressive-enhancement script. The backup of the original Plesk page was preserved as `httpdocs/www/index.html-260815`.

The actual domain and hosting work happened on the same evening as the travel chaos. `www.altbod.live` was purchased, hosting was created on the Grant Genie server and DNS was sorted after some friction. TLS followed with an SSL certificate install. The assumption at the time was that mail and subdomains were not needed yet, so the scope stayed deliberately tiny.

The build workflow was phone-first. I was using NMM on Android to copy a standard `AGENTS.md` into the site root, then create `docs/ai/site-overview.md` and `docs/ai/voice.md`. A `CodexRemote` control point was added on Desktop and `AltBod` was added to the SSH config. I also copied the site `.ssh/` material from another server site using NMM so the remote tooling could talk to the box properly.

Verification was split across tools. ChatGPT Remote was used to confirm the SSH connection and Codex then replaced the Plesk holding page with the first intentionally unhinged homepage. The technical log records that the public HTTPS endpoint returned HTTP 200 and the expected homepage content, so the replacement was live rather than merely wishful.

The later timeline in the record shows the same pattern of careful small-step work: the human story and the geek notes were kept as two distinct paths backed by one underlying record, with the implementation anchored by `docs/ai/site-overview.md`, `docs/ai/voice.md` and the project-root `AGENTS.md`. For this entry, though, the important thing is the shape of the work: domain, DNS, TLS, SSH and a first page built from a phone while the trains behaved like tiny cursed goblins.