About this website

Since I was 8 years old, I've published some iteration of a personal website to the Internet.

You're now looking at Version 18, first shipped in 2024, and now featuring 100% fewer rounded corners. Also, since this kind of thing is mostly a personality showcase, I'm living a little. Is this the decade we stop centering things? What if we do way too much with page transitions? (Yes.)

Some fun anecdotes from a jog down memory lane:

Repeat engagement

The year is 2009. Your family is busy recovering from some poor investment decisions made during the recession. You've just started middle school, which is kind of far and filled with bigger kids. But you are Now Twelve, and you've just learned that gradients and a Photoshop trial are both free.

As it turns out, what the people want is a page loaded up with offers of child labor design services. But what the people really want is repeat engagement. And a header graphic that changes based on the time of day? Come back for a timed ticket. That sunset isn't going to look at itself.

WordPress clones

What came before? Well, the first versions were primitive and written in Microsoft FrontPage, which was like Microsoft Word for dorks. Versions 2 thru 4 ran on a WordPress clone I wrote, except I was 9 and very bad at writing WordPress clones.

Just a few years later though, I was over the knock-offs and onto the real, bona fide thing. Between age 11 and 15, I published 4 WordPress themes including one that was, in its heyday, installed on 50,000+ websites.

Making open-source things was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, being age 13 with a popular theme was a great way to get a lot of attention. On the other hand, being age 13 with a popular theme was a great way to get a lot of attention. Most open-source projects run on goodwill, but a few of them are run by children.

2009 was a big year

My core life problem, I wrote in April 2009, is that I can't take on any more clients because I have all this state-mandated standardized testing. Also, Internet Explorer 6. But mostly it's No Child Left Behind and big government cramping my freelance game!

Probably getting high off my own supply didn't help. I shipped so many personal landing pages in 2009 that I labeled them all minor updates to version 5. You want to be the 12-year-old with a website; not the 12-year old with 5 websites. That's like being CEO of 5 companies on LinkedIn.

Probably brainstorming bad slogans to justify redesigns also didn't help. "I have sufficient expertise" turned into "Experience is vital" turned into "It's time you chose the stripes." Why was I the stripes? Whatever. The best website is the one with the most website.