This is my final website.

My first website was created thirty years ago. Only a privileged few with access to the LAN at a certain nerdy sleep-away camp ever laid eyes upon it. Visitors were treated to some ramblings about aliens—the Roswell kind—surrounded by everyone’s favorite ’90s web design clichés. The <blink> tag was featured liberally. The site was sadly not preserved due to lack of a floppy disk.

If not for the camp’s strict prohibition on video games before dinner, the site wouldn’t have existed to begin with. What adolescent would voluntarily take lessons on C and HTML when they could be playing Sim City 2000? For both the gaming policy, and the counselor from New Zealand who taught us, I am eternally grateful.

Upon returning home an AOL account allowed me to establish myself among the Geocities. This was my first public site and the first to bear my handle, Apreche.

Throughout high school I continuously redesigned this site as my skills with HTML and PaintShop Pro improved. This is clearly evident in its final incarnation. I’m quite proud of the design and truly embarrassed by the video game reviews. The principles of digital preservation require I keep it online, against my better judgement.

At university there were so many other things competing for my time that I largely abandoned the web until a friend turned me onto the concept of blogging during my senior year. Under the title of Gourmet Geek I presented myself as a nerd of refined taste. The chronological structure provided by the Blosxom engine turned my attention away from design and towards content.

Particularly notable is that in June of 2004 I posted a single audioblog. Podcasts and RSS enclosures were a recent development, but I was not yet aware of them. It would be at least another year before the start of GeekNights.

Graduating college meant saying goodbye to a fast and free Internet connection, static IP address, and DNS entry. It was time to register my own domain. With gourmetgeek.com unavailable I went back to using my handle. Apreche.net was cheaper and sounded better than apreche.com. With the new domain I migrated all the content to WordPress. This turned out to be a prudent choice as the blog outlasted the Blosxom engine by several years.

Apreche.net ended without any kind of farewell message. I never intended to let it languish. It is of little surprise the final post came in Twitter’s peak year of 2012. Between social media and the podcast I had nothing unspoken saved for a blog. Mustering motivation to repeat myself in long form proved too difficult to overcome.

Over a decade later I find myself having effectively quit social media. With the podcast as the only outlet, my stores of creative energy are replenished. Combining all the lessons of the past, from summer camp to social media, I have built an appropriate platform which I am sure will have real staying power.

You may notice the aesthetic and structure of this site is heavily inspired by that of a printed book. This is in part an attempt to adhere to The Chicago Manual of Style. To a greater extent it is an attempt to express that this site is not just a blog. Apreche.space represents my life’s collected works.

As no person is a monolith, a personal website should not be either. There shall be no restrictions on subject matter or artistic medium. Anything I care to create and share with the world will be published here, my ultimate digital home.