Internet Denizen & Raconteur

In the beginning, there was HTML +, which I taught myself in the spring of 1994 when I was working at the University of Washington in room T281D of the university's teaching hospital complex. It took about a day.

I ftp'd my files to the http server I'd set up in the server room, a sort of closet in the back really, and boom! I'd published a website.

Fast-forward to late 2025, and there are a bajillion web frameworks, content management systems (CMSs), and scripting & programming languages. Along the way, the [world wide] web became synonymous with the Internet and the iPhone put the Internet in everyone's pocket.

At some indeterminate time in between, the web jumped the shark.

As with most tradegies of the commons, it was series of small things over time. Cory Doctorow nailed the explanation in his The 'Enshittification' of TikTok article on Wired in January 2023. It's worth a read.

Resolving to be part of the solution instead of the precipitate, welcome to my retro-ish website.