I recently got some domain registration emails, and realized it’s been fifteen years since I started this site. That’s a lot of water under the bridge.

One of the main reasons I started it was because I was worried about my job (rightfully so, though not on the timeline I feared) and felt that as a web developer, I should have my own website. And so, after months of research and vacillation, I registered the three domains, tedohara.org, tedohara.net and tedohara.com, with tedohara.net being the primary domain, and the other two being redirects to tedohara.net. (I later added teohara.blog which is also a redirect, tedohara.me, which is currently parked, and tedohara.photography, which currently points to the Photography category of this site, but which could become a site of its own at some point. The point of having all these extra domains is to prevent domain squatting).

I requested the first three domains Thursday night, August 11, 2011, and they became available on the internet the next day with a placeholder site. I spent Friday evening just playing with the Dreamhost control panel, and uploaded the WordPress software and wrote my first post on Saturday, August 13.

It’s pleasant having my own website. While I intended originally to devote a lot of time to web development posts, it very quickly became (devolved?) into a place where I could post about anything I wanted to, so it became a mix of photography, posts about vacations, motorcycling, diving, kayaking, and whatever else I was up to, or have an opinion on.

Although not every post is a winner, in general I enjoy reading my own writing, and I’m especially glad I’ve written about my trips to Bonaire and the United Kingdom, as it helps me relive those trips.

I also feel it’s important to own my online identity. While I enjoy Mastodon (and until Elon Musk took it over, Twitter) and sometimes post there, here is where I post something if I have anything in particular to say. This is my domain, not beholden to the whims of some social media company. I’ve been very happy with Dreamhost over the past 15 years, but if something were to happen to them, or they become unpalatable as a company somehow, I own the domain, and I can move it elsewhere.

For a while, I strove for a minimum of a post a month, which I was able to maintain for eight years, until my mother’s illness; I will admit to being more sporadic since. Part of that was busy-ness during the time she was ill, and part of that is that I have less going on in my life that I want to share at the moment. I haven’t been diving in years, though I miss it, and haven’t been traveling either. I am still motorcycling, but I find long days on the bike painful, so I haven’t been riding as much, though I am thinking of another trip to the White Mountains.

But while I haven’t posted as much as I did in the early years, this site is still alive, and very important to me.