I'm a techie, tinkerer, and father living in beautiful Southern California. My day job is being a smartypants technologist at a tech company, where I get to play with cool stuff. This is my personal website, which has been producing hot, fresh content off and on since 2002. Let's talk about that a bit, because my site is a bit of a unicorn thanks to its longevity.

🕸️ The Dawn of the Web

Back in the day, it was cool to have a blog. GeoCities, Tumblr, Drupal, and other platforms were all the rage. Back in 2002, I was finishing up my time at Georgia Tech and decided to study abroad for my last semester. I created the site to chronicle my journey with the legendary Movable Type. I would write on my prized Titanium PowerBook using a local install of Movable Type, generate the static files, and use a custom Python script to upload new content whenever I could find an Internet Cafe (yes... that was a thing). It was joyous! Blogrolls, web rings, RSS feeds... the web was so much fun.

💀 Facebook Ruins Everything

Social media has been both a blessing and a curse. Over time, that line has shifted sharply into cursed territory. At first, social media platforms enabled people to have a presence on the web with very little effort, but also very little customization and control. The thing that really kicked the social media silos into high gear was the social part of social media – the ability to interact with friends and family and share photos, creating replies, and "reposting" and "liking" interesting content.

But, social media has been a bad thing for the social web. These silos come and go, taking people's history with them. They're also monetized through advertising and the sale of personal information for targeting. Their algorithms are tailored to keep users engaged so that their eyeballs see as many ads as possible. As a result, social media silos are often hotbeds of hate, misinformation, and divisiveness. Outrage is a highly motivating way to keep people engaged, and the world is worse off for it.

Its been a long time since the personal social web has been a thing. Silos have effectively killed blogging, which is a shame, because personal websites aren't about "engagement" or making money by selling people's information. They're about being yourself, holding onto memories, and connecting with others.

👻 Web Hosting: Not Dead Yet

Back in 2013, I joined DreamHost to lead Software Development. DreamHost is a special place, with lovely people, a great culture, and a mission to help people own their digital presence. DreamHost hadn't given up on the social web, but they also hadn't figured out how to re-ignite it. I spent a lot of time searching for pockets of activity on the social web, and attempting to coax those embers into bonfires. That work took me into the WordPress community, where DreamHost has an incredible WordPress user base. But, then I truly found my community – the IndieWeb movement.

🪐 A New Hope: The IndieWeb

The IndieWeb is not just a community, its a movement. It describes itself as "a people-focused alternative to the "corporate web," emphasizing that "your content is yours," "you are better connected," and "you are in control." These were my people. These are my people.

With an intersection between my work and the IndieWeb community, I kicked off a project to repatriate my data from Instragram, Facebook, and Twitter, downloading all of my information, closing my accounts, and re-hosting it all on a new website. I also grabbed all of my content from my legacy websites dating back to 2002, centralizing it all into a site that was truly mine.

At first, I used an open source, IndieWeb CMS called Known. Known served as a wonderful introduction to IndieWeb standards and principles like POSSE, IndieAuth, micropub and microformats 2.

My site fully reconnected me to the open social web, free from the encumbrances of surveillance capitalism and bad actors like Meta and X, both of which are owned by terrible people with no moral or ethical compass. I was posting regularly, with photos, short-form microblog posts, articles, and even reviews, bookmarks, and likes. I started tracking my location 24/7 using my phone, saving it all to a private repository. I syndicated my content out to Twitter for a long time until I finally gave up on it, and now I syndicate to new, more open platforms like Mastodon and BlueSky.

🏠 Coming Home

After a really promising start, Known ultimately stagnated. There is still a small community maintaining it, creating plugins and keeping it up to date with evolving standards, but its not really a platform for the future anymore. Plus, it uses technologies that are not really in my wheelhouse, like PHP, and it requires big beefy relational databases to store its content.

In 2023-2024, I started thinking about what was next for this site. I had a desire to catch up to modern web standards, adopt my favorite programming language, Python, and make hosting cheap, simple, and easy. What you see today is the result of a few years of off-and-on work on my new CMS, Dwell.

Dwell is a powerful, but simple CMS built in Python. It stores all of its content in JSON files on disk, and uses the excellent, tiny, and powerful DuckDB database engine to enable lightning fast queries. Dwell is currently not open source. It was briefly, but I was changing things so quickly that I didn't really want to attract a community that I would need to manage. That may change in the future, but for now, I am pretty satisfied with the result.

✨ A Surprising Inspiration

Dwell is ultimately a repository for memories. The breadth and depth of the content is special, and I wanted to be able to savor the special moments in my life; to keep myself grounded in what matters most – family and friends and our shared memories. When I was searching for inspiration for the design and architecture of Dwell, I found it in a surprising place.

There is a now legendary episode of the hit AMC show Mad Men entitled The Wheel. The episode focuses on an advertising campaign pitch to Kodak, who was preparing to release a new slide projector. The main character, Don Draper, gives a stunning pitch that is worth watching. In it, Draper leans into the power of nostalgia:

Technology is a glittering lure. But there is the rare occasion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash, if they have a sentimental bond with the product.

My first job, I was in house at a fur company with this old pro copywriter, Greek, named Teddy. And Teddy told me the most important idea in advertising was ‘new.’ Creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of calamine lotion.

But he also talked about a deeper bond with the product: nostalgia. It’s delicate, but potent. Teddy told me that in Greek nostalgia literally means ‘the pain from an old wound.’ It’s a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone.

This device isn’t a space ship. It’s a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards. Takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called ‘The Wheel.’ It’s called ‘The Carousel.’ It lets us travel the way a child travels. Around and around and back home again to a place where we know we are loved.

Don's monologue is easily the best articulation of the power of nostalgia and memories. Living life to the fullest means treasuring every moment. This website is not a wheel, its a time machine. The main part of this site is the timeline, which contains nearly every piece of content I've ever created on the internet. At the top right of the timeline, you'll find a circular widget. As you scroll forward and backward, you'll see the indicators in the three rings move along with you, as the rings represent years, months, and days. If you click the widget, you'll enter a time machine that allows you to jump to any position in the timeline, discovering my life experiences, travels, and more.

On the bottom right of the screen, you'll sometimes see a "mini map." As you scroll, the map will update, following my location at each position in the timeline. You'll find monthly and yearly summaries, and a special filter in the navigation bar that allows you to decide what types of content you'll see. If you're a person that still uses a feed reader, check out my feed generator, it allows you to subscribe to your own customized feed.

After several years of development, I am really happy to have a new home. I hope you enjoy it here.