In the cold December of 2021, I was listening to Jaron Lanier's non-fiction work You Are Not A Gadget and was struck by something the author said about personal websites. He commented that in the early days of the web, before the advent of social media, fewer people had the ability to express themselves online, but the expression was more diverse and less formulaic.

His thoughts also meshed with some comments I have made in retro-computing message boards about my belief that the democratization of technology and the upswell of the connected population has not improved the Internet. The technological prowess required to self-publish on the early net was a great filter that limited the reach of the vast, technologically inarticulate idiot masses that now sully YouTube comments sections, Twitter feeds, and our Facebook walls. The easy access and anonymity that modern idiots enjoy recalls John Gabriel's "Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory." I'm not foolish enough to believe that the early Internet was free of all stupidity, but the effort required to be in the arena certainly seemed to raise the level of discourse such that at least the idiocy was coherent most of the time.

Having maintained a personal website from around 1999 (just before I began post-secondary education) and into the mid-2000s (just a few years into my teaching career), his words struck a chord of nostalgia within me. Certainly my original website, Snap's Domain which was hosted through the University of Western Ontario's student webserver, was a much more personal (and definitely more embarassing) expression of my identity than is my Facebook page, or my now-abandoned Twitter account.

It was in this feeling of nostalgia that I made a conscious decision to begin moving away from social media and back to that "Wild West" of the unpolished web. I felt strongly that I wanted to resurrect the spirit, if not necessarily the self-involved navel-gazing of the original Snap's Domain. I was struck by the desire to have a place where I could share the parts of myself that I wanted to share, while simultaneously adding to the unique expression on the web, and learning something new as well.

To that end, I decided to even more fully commit to this spirit by rejecting the use of the WYSIWYG web editors I previously employed (and their drag and drop web publishing descendants) and finally teach myself the native HTML language, as well as the more recently arrived CSS. What you are reading is the first instantiation of that effort, one that will evolve as my studies in coding continue.

I welcome you to join me on this journey by unplugging from the polished world of social media and prefabricated site content, and spending some time in the backwaters of the personalized web. I hope you will enjoy experiencing it as much as I am enjoying generating it.