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 updating 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. I look back fondly on this era of self-publishing, and I’m glad I have this digital scrapbook to look back on.

In the 2010s, I gave up on gathering my own content. Instead I focused on posting to IG, Twitter, Tumblr. It was fun and social. And in that fog, the platforms had decisively won. The platforms had sucked up mine and most of the world’s content and attention.

But 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.