I’ve been doing some version of this since around 2001 – longer if you count Geocities (which I do – shoutout to my sunsetstrip peeps). This post is a tour through all the iterations: the designs, the decisions, and the occasional disasters. Most of the screenshots came from the Wayback Machine, so things look a little rough around the edges. Seemed appropriate.

I’m genuinely proud of how long I’ve kept at it. I’m also a little embarrassed by some of what I put out into the world in my twenties. Both things can be true.

2003 – WTMcGee.com & Movable Type

The nickname came first, the domain followed. wtmcgee.com was my first blog on my own hosting, running on Movable Type with a base theme I was slowly picking apart as I learned HTML and CSS. This was before social media made shouting into the void an Olympic sport, so a lot of my friends had blogs too — we’d post, comment on each other’s stuff, and do the whole community thing. It was good, actually.

The most interesting artifact here is the blogroll. Some of those links are a pretty honest record of how much my politics have shifted over the years.

2004 – The Blobby Redesign

I started tinkering with the theme around this point, though nothing too dramatic. 2004 was a different era in web design, and that thing at the top passed for a logo. I’m going to leave it at that.

2005 – I Read Zeldman’s Book

This one matters more than the others. I picked up Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman and it genuinely changed my life. Not in a “wow, good book” way – in a “went back to school, changed careers, decided this was the thing I wanted to do” way. It lit up an interest in web development, web standards, and the community of people who cared about building the web the right way. I started going to conferences. I enrolled in a Digital Media program. I eventually made a career out of it.

So yeah. Influential book.

2006 – Getting Serious About It

Full Sail, Digital Media degree, learning Movable Type properly. I migrated everything to DanielAndrews.com around this time – partly because I was getting serious about the craft, partly because “wtmcgee” wasn’t going to land me any freelance work. The layout got a little tighter, the code got a little cleaner, and I started to focus on writing about tech more than just rambling. Still a little rambling, though.

2008 – Moved to WordPress, incorporated Flickr (RIP)

Migrated to WordPress and started experimenting with the idea of a landing page – the thinking being that maybe this could become a portfolio site someday. My career was moving fast at this point: professional web design and development, freelance work on the side. The portfolio never really materialized into a necessity, but it was fun to try something other than the standard reverse-chronological firehose.

2010 – Trying on the “Assorted Nerdery” Thing

A genuinely prolific writing period. I was learning a lot at work and started figuring out that I loved writing about consumer tech, programming, and all the surrounding noise. Slapped “Assorted Nerdery” on it and kept the domain I’d always had. Fifteen years later, here we are. I still wish the domain was cheaper.

2013 – I Had a Kid

My first son was born in early 2013. Shortly after — like, weeks after – Michael and I decided to build an RSS reader. Because apparently that’s what you do when you haven’t slept.

We called it Bulletin. Google announced they were shutting down Reader right after we committed to the project, so we went from “we have all the time in the world” to “we need to ship before July 1st” in about a week. I was stealing 30 minutes here and there between feedings and somehow we got a beta out in six weeks.

This site design during this period reflects my mental state perfectly. I moved things to a simple landing page with archive links. The writing slowed to a crawl. I had a newborn and a side product and a full-time job. Something had to give.

Side note: “The White and Gold” was a brief attempt at a Georgia Tech football blog. I thought it was niche enough to find an audience. It did not.

2014 – Moved to Tumblr

Bulletin was running. The baby was older but not by much. I got tired of managing my own hosting and figured Tumblr would make things easier. I imported my posts, grabbed a theme off the shelf, and stopped writing almost entirely.

2015 – Back to WordPress, and Closing a Chapter

Redirecting my domain to Tumblr had mostly fooled everyone, but it stopped fooling me. I migrated back, grabbed the simplest WordPress theme I could find, and tried to get moving again. It was also the year Bulletin shut down – we were late to the RSS gold rush and the alternatives got more investment than Michael and I were able to put in. Proud of what we built. Sad to close it. But there was something freeing about having just the one thing again.

2016 – The Blank, Serif, Single Column Layout

This started with real ambition: build my own WordPress theme from scratch, no cruft, something I could actually iterate on. I stripped everything down to the studs and started building templates one by one.

Then my second son was born. Then I landed a job at a startup. Then Trump got elected and killed my desire to write about anything.

The theme sat like that for nearly a decade. I wrote occasionally, but the design? Completely untouched. Some layouts just accidentally become permanent.

2026 – Okay, For Real This Time

The kids are older now. I actually have spare time again – a thing I’d mostly forgotten existed. The world is also, to put it gently, a lot to absorb, and I wanted somewhere to put my attention that wasn’t just doom-scrolling or video games.

So I stripped things back down again and tried to build something I actually want to look at. The goal isn’t to document a final, finished design. It’s to have something alive enough to keep tinkering with – and to find out whether I still have something worth saying.