I had forgotten that launching a website still involves periods of staring at DNS propagation tools like a Victorian man awaiting news from the front.
Modern technology presents itself as immediate now. Seamless. Invisible. You buy a domain, click a few buttons, and expect your small corner of the internet to materialise instantly like a summoned spirit.
Instead, what actually happens is this:
You tell the internet your website now lives somewhere else and then wait politely while invisible machines around the world slowly gossip amongst themselves about whether this is true.
“Propagation,” they call it.
A word which, after enough repetition, starts sounding less like networking infrastructure and more like a post-earthquake civil engineering term. Very Christchurch. Somewhere between liquefaction and subsidence.
Initially, nothing happened.
Then Ireland recognised the new nameservers.
Australia followed shortly afterwards with a sort of relaxed practical acceptance. Auckland, meanwhile, remained sceptical for what felt like an unnecessarily emotional amount of time.
The Swiss declined involvement entirely.
Lille, oddly, retained the old nameservers long after most of Europe had moved on. I became disproportionately invested in this. At one point I found myself quietly switching the DNS checker region back to France just to see whether Lille had finally accepted the new reality.
It had not.
This is the strange thing about invisible systems. Human beings cannot resist assigning personality to them. Before long, global DNS infrastructure had transformed in my mind into a collection of emotionally distinct regional attitudes.
Ireland was supportive.
The UK, despite physically hosting the website, appeared completely unaware of its existence.
Germany was technically competent but regionally inconsistent.
And Auckland behaved like an emotionally unavailable ex-partner whose approval I absolutely did not need, despite refreshing repeatedly in the hope of receiving it.
Underneath all our supposedly frictionless modern technology still exists a world powered by:
- caching,
- delegation,
- propagation,
- uncertainty,
- and occasionally walking away to eat lunch while servers continue discussing your existence behind the scenes.
Which, honestly, may not be a terrible metaphor for human life either.
Eventually Auckland accepted reality.
The website appeared.
And now here we are.
Still not wrong since 1973™.
— g