About

Greetings, and thank you for visiting!

We’re a typical Northwest family (or at least we think we are, anyway) who has a geeky dad who has been a developer of some sort since getting out of the Army in 1995.

The “World Wide Web” was opened to the public in 1995, and in October of that year, this site began. It wasn’t much more than a few pages that were (sort of) kept updated in order to let family know what was going on. They they lived on the ‘other coast’ from, and while calling worked, it wasn’t “cool.” It also was a way to have fun, and it was more necessary in the days before Facebook was a thing. Over the years, it has been a fun hobby, and while Facebook’s popularity has made individual websites mostly a thing of the past, it has proven useful occasionally, and it is fun to pick at now and again. We (well, dad does anyway) think of it as a modern day scrapbook.

The switch to WordPress thas been a journey. For more than 20 years, the website was homegrown, and while it was based on a framework, it was built on individual pages, with no database: each page had its own link. Some level of standardization grew out among the different areas, and some automation was developed to make it easier, but in the end, even using an app to help build the pages it took too long to keep current, and it consistently fell farther and farther behind. Finally, dad caved, and ported the site to WordPress. The old site had more than 4500 pages, but not all of them were ported over. The pages that had not been viewed for years (such as the section devoted to water towers, or the pages dedicated to the exit and food option signs on the freeways and interstates dad encountered) were tossed into the virtual trashcan – after a local copy was saved off, of course.

So anyway, poke around, and enjoy. Some stuff from 20 years ago still survives, and hopefully will be ported over sooner rather than later. I’m also hoping that the bulk of the site will remain fairly updated. Time will tell, eh?