A place to put things
Why I built my own website in 2026, what I plan to put on it, and why the good stuff kept disappearing from everywhere else I used to write.
I have been writing on the internet, on and off, for about twenty years. Almost none of it still exists.
The forum where I argued about webOS is gone. The blog where I reviewed apps for Palm’s TouchPad — a device that lived for forty-nine days — is gone, which is at least thematically consistent. The photos went into a service that got acquired, then sunset, then replaced by a different service that will eventually do the same. What survived survived by accident.
So: this. A site I own, at a domain I pay for, with the writing in plain text files on my own computer. If everything else goes away, this doesn’t.
What I’m planning to put here
Three things, roughly.
Writing, which is this — longer pieces about whatever I’ve been turning over. I’m a program manager, so a fair amount of that is going to be about how work actually gets done: the difference between a plan and a schedule, why the status update nobody reads is a symptom rather than a problem, what it takes to keep twelve people pointed the same direction. I’ve also never stopped being the person who reads every spec sheet, so expect the occasional overlong opinion about a camera or a phone.
Photos, which is the part I’m most excited about. I’ve been shooting seriously for years and doing almost nothing with it beyond a shared album that two people open. The photosets here are meant to be looked at properly — big, in order, with the frames that didn’t earn their place cut out.
The circular things. At some point I noticed that both of my hobbies had converged on the same shape. Records on one wall, disc golf discs in a bag by the door. I don’t have a thesis about this yet. I’m fairly sure one is coming.
The honeymoon set is up first
The first thing I’ve published is the honeymoon set — eleven days across Iceland and the Netherlands in October 2023. It sat in a folder for nearly three years, 153 frames, untouched. Building this site finally gave me a reason to go through it and pick the forty-seven that still hold up.
That turned out to be the actual argument for doing this. Not that anyone needs another personal website. Just that having somewhere to put things changes what you bother to make.
How it’s built
Plain markdown files, a static site generator, and a folder of photos that get resized on the way in. No database, no CMS, no comment section. The whole thing is a directory I can copy to a hard drive.
That’s deliberate. The last twenty years taught me that the durable format is the boring one.