History and Background

I’ve run a personal website of one kind of another for going on twenty years or so. Most of the time it has been Wordpress-based, sometimes managing the db and backend myself, sometimes using a modern turnkey type of host. It started in my time as a DJ and music producer. Later, in the early days of social media, while I was working for the Palm Beach County Library System, I wrote some popular posts on using social media to promote libraries, some of which were referenced in various Master of Library Science programs.

When I moved on from that position, my personal website fell by the wayside a bit. I was working on an English degree, so I was writing a lot for that, not to mention my own fiction projects, which will still someday see the light of day.

With social media, personal sites also diminished in popularity some. Using Wordpress for me also made it somewhat hard to get excited about updating the site.

In 2025, my wife and I decided to move from Florida to Northern Virginia. While I learned a lot, I felt my career with Palm Beach County had probably run its course, and I was ready for a new challenge. As a side effect, in our transition, it’s the first time since I was possibly 16 that I wasn’t working a 40 hour (or more) work week.

When thinking about this site, I wanted to do something very minimal that puts content first, but still show quite subtle and careful design touches. Essentially everything I know about design is self-taught with a lot of effort and persistence. This site was built from the mini-blog Astro theme, as a jumping-off point, but has of course seen many customizations.

The site uses CSS transitions from page to page, which you may not notice in Firefox, but should see in all the other browsers. That’s how the semi-random circle SVGs appear to slide over to new sizes and locations. It was a fun idea I wanted to try to give a splash of something while sticking to the very minimal ethos.