You know, at Apple when we make a computer, what’s the lifespan of it? Maybe three years. In five years it’s a doorstop. Technology moves so fast. If you do your job right with Toy Story, this thing could last forever. — Steve Jobs, to John Lasseter and Ed Catmull

I got my start on the web on Prodigy in the mid-90s (I recall playing TradeWars 2002 on BBSes around those times, too). The first webpage I built was on Geocities in 1995 - it was a Warcraft 2 fan site. Two years later I was making money on the web. I was a “professional” web site person.

In the thirty years since I’ve built over one hundred projects. Some were well recognized in their time. As many were games or marketing websites for TV & film, I hope they did their job making audiences happy. All of them are forgotten to history. But not to me. I express myself through my work – commercial or otherwise – and it’s woven into who I am. In recent years I’ve cursed myself for not doing a better job of preserving my own history, especially as I now have children who I assume will be keen to know more about some of the things I’m proud of in my past. I set out to make this space into my personal digital mausoleum – a portfolio of the stuff I did, wrote and said that felt like it mattered to my professional self at the time.

AI made most of this possible, of course, but the work of pulling and archiving my whole career is very human. Digging up old work brought real joy, not just seeing it revived but remembering the people I made it with.

The Timeline

The homepage now presents everything in a single timeline. A “toastal” (a combination modal and toast) appears as you scroll to tell you where I was and what I was doing at that point in time. You’ll notice “branches” on the left representing times when I was teaching alongside my regular work. I’ve also imported all my old “tweets” here and started posting again, this time on the blog itself. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for the whole site or just those posts if you’d like to “follow” me.

Building this

I developed a skill I called “the Archivist”. Its job was to comb the Internet for… me and, based on what it found, help me make decisions on how to preserve it. Through sources like Archive.org, Flickr, Vimeo and random semi-forgotten corners of the web we uncovered…

  • 731 tweets across two accounts spanning 19 years
  • Photos dating back that long too (coming soon!)
  • Three blogs I used to maintain, at least one of which I forgot existed
  • Dozens of portfolio pieces documented, with more coming

I’m still working to restore and document everything – for now, each portfolio piece is pretty thin as I get all the content together. It’ll get there. I intend to fill it with anecdotes and code snippets and things I found interesting or was proud of. Who knows, maybe it’ll be useful for someone some day.

If you see this and enjoy it, please let me know. I’d love feedback.