tl;dr
The internet has changed so much since I created this site in back in 2001. Messing around with my website over the winter break gave me a chance to reminisce and helped me redefine my purpose here.
(tl;dr = too long; didn’t read)
Remember when we used to all watch the same TV shows? I mean, we might not all be watching exactly the same content, but we all only had a limited number of ways to be entertained, so we would generally share at least a few streams of entertainment with most people. Or we would have at least heard of what other people were watching.
Remember when the internet was relatively new and there was very little advertising? And YouTube and social media hadn’t been invented yet, so there were no influencers? No TikTok?
This is starting to remind of the “Remember when…” skits on Saturday Night Live…
Unintentional Trip Down Memory Lane
I have been thinking about that time a lot over the past few days as I have been going through some of the old content from my website. I decided to move my website from Doteasy servers, where it has lived for the past twenty-four years, to WordPress servers, mainly because the hosting fees at Doteasy have become too expensive to justify for a simple personal blog. I have been meaning to make this move for the past few years, but it takes quite a lot of work to migrate a whole website, so I kept putting it off. Over this year’s winter break, I finally managed to do it.
When I first started this site back in 2001, I posted a lot about movies and shows I was watching, or books that I had read. I guess I was seeking connection with others based on mutual interests. I used to follow a number of other bloggers, most of whom I knew personally, and we would comment on each other’s content. It was a kinder, friendlier, smaller internet back then.
What is it all for?
The migration process has helped me focus my thinking about my shaneycrawford dotcom website. Over the past few years, I have been testing out using various platforms (email, mailing lists, Facebook, LinkedIn, Medium, Substack, etc.) for sharing my posts, but I wasn’t able to settle on any of them because I wasn’t sure what I was trying to accomplish with my website.
- Am I trying to become an influencer?
- Am I trying to earn money through my site?
- Am I trying to sell something (like coaching services)?
Going through all 350+ posts on this site over the past few days has helped me think this through, and the answer to all of the above, at least right now, is “NO”.
I made this site because I wanted to connect with people. That is still the primary reason why I maintain the site. I also just like learning about web design and playing around with the latest features in WordPress. My original site was all hand-coded with HTML, which I really enjoyed doing, but I love the ease of working with blocks and templates in WordPress, especially since it saves me hours of work when I get capricious and decide to change random things on my site for no real reason.
Be the Antithesis
So, over the past few days I have come to some conclusions about my website and what I am trying to accomplish with it.
- I want my website to serve as an archive of my life and the times that I am living in.
- I want it to embody the ideals of the late 1990s / early 2000s internet, when this whole new arena for humanity served as a place of creativity, connection, and hope.
- I want to update it whenever I feel like it, at whatever cadence I decide, for the love of writing and sharing, and for no other real reason.
- I want it to be aesthetically pleasing and easy to navigate.
- I want it to be relatively low-tech.
- I want it to be free. I don’t want to put ads on the site or ask people to pay for my content.
- I want it to be the antithesis of hustle culture, AI slop, and screen addiction.
- I want to keep my list of subscribers “clean” and not try to woo people to my site just for the sake of increasing numbers. I want to feel the same way about having ten subscribers as I would about having ten million subscribers. I want to treasure each and every subscription because it means that someone made the decision to connect with me.
- Overall, I want to keep it simple and serene, which will continue to be the keywords for my life this year (as I am writing this on January 1, 2026).
I hope that my site can act as an ๅฑ ๅ ดๆ (ใใฐใใ, ibasho), or a comfortable place where you feel like you belong, and you are not expected to DO anything, or BUY anything.
I hope you like it here as much as I do.
Apologies for the double emails during the switch-over from Doteasy to WordPress. Also, if you didn’t receive any emails from shaneycrawford dotcom over the past couple of days, please check your spam folder and mark my emails as “not spam”!
