About

Why this website

I created my first website in the mid-90s. I started on Geocities and quickly learned HTML. Before long, I designed and hosted my own sites. I was thrilled to be able to share ideas simply by transferring text files to a server.

During the mid-2000s, I stopped publishing to my own sites and posted to services like Flickr (photos) and delicious (bookmarks) instead. This led me to create software to pull the content I shared elsewhere back into a single, published feed here. I look back fondly on this era of self-publishing, and I’m glad I have this digital scrapbook to look back on.

But in the 2010s, I completely gave up on the idea of gathering my own content. I posted to IG, Twitter, Tumblr. It was fun and social, but the platforms had decisively won. The platforms had sucked up most of the world’s content and attention.

So now I’m over the emphermeral aspects of social media. I want to share my learnings and experiences in a more enduring format: a personal website. I’m back to where I started and it’s a joy.

If you have a personal website that you’d think I’d resonate with, I’d love to hear about it. The web needs more non-commercial destinations.