About

Hi! I’m John, and I have an aggressive hunger and thirst for all that life has to offer. Sometimes I document my experiences here on my blog.

I’ve been oversharing on the web since the late 90s. I built my first website in 1998 on “AOL Hometown”, which offered 12mb of server space. At first, the content was a mix of inside jokes among friends, South Park .gifs, and links to other websites that I enjoyed. I’m sure I had an “under construction” .gif on there, too. The world wide web didn’t feel so big back then. If you were a teenager in the 90s, you probably remember sites like mine.

Whenever I found a website with a “cool” design, I’d read through the source code to try and understood how it was built. I was obsessed with HTML and building websites, but also limited in that I was sharing a Gateway desktop PC with 5 family members on a dial up connection… and we only had one phone line. The struggle was real. When I could get away with it, I’d print out source code and read through it when I wasn’t able to use the computer.

Once I learned some proper HTML and CSS, I moved my operation from AOL over to Angelfire. As my skillz grew, I grew tired of storage limits (and ads), and I moved my site onto a friend’s dedicated server. Now I could post as many images as I wanted to, along with MP3s which I’d link to from my updates to share the music I was into.

At this point I was posting updates to my site multiple times a day. The term “blogging” wasn’t really in the lexicon at that point, but that’s exactly what I was doing. Content management systems like WordPress weren’t around back then; I was updating my site by hand, via HMTL, whenever I wanted to create a new post.

Eventually I graduated to Greymatter, the first open source blogging solution. This felt like a massive upgrade in many ways, but importantly it allowed my visitors to comment on my posts. Prior to these comments, audience interaction was limited to individual emails (and my “guestbook”, remember those), but now I had a direct feedback loop and really started to feel the community that formed around my little site.

I would write about my personal life quite a bit. I wrote about my exploits at school and all the trouble I got myself into. I’d post all sorts of strange/funny things that I found on the web and that people would send to me. I wrote about movies that I saw, concerts that I attended, the things I did on the weekends with my friends,  albums (mostly metal) that I was obsessing over, and life as an awkward, insecure teenager trying to figure out where he fit in the world.

This “everything and nothing” approach seemed to resonate with my growing audience. I was getting lots of positive feedback and making connections with people all over the world in a way that felt new and important. Before I knew, it my site had a legitimate, dedicated following with thousands of unique visitors every day. I would regularly see comments from folks that their school/library network had blocked my website, and that they couldn’t wait to get home each day to check my site for updates. I had a following. How the hell did this happen?

I knew nothing about SEO back then, but I found myself dealing with increasingly large amounts of traffic which led to hosting issues. I had to change hosting providers countless times over the years as my site put too much strain on the server or tested the limits of their “unlimited bandwidth” plans.

This all came to a head when my site was mentioned on a popular radio show (remember, it was the 90s) and subsequently pulled down by my host for crashing the server on which it resided. Heated words were exchanged, and he refused to share my files with me. Since I didn’t have them backed up, I had to piece things together from multiple sources. Live and learn!

As a result of this situation, I started learning more about server logs and analytics. Google Analytics wasn’t a thing back then; extreme-dm.com was the best (free) option that I was aware of.

As I empowered myself with data, I began to learn more about my audience: where they were coming from and what they were looking at. Google was still passing search queries back then, so I could see the words that folks were searching for to ultimately find my site.

I loved going through this data, searching those same queries myself, and seeing how my site ranked relative to other sites for each term. I remember sharing a story about trying to get someone to buy us alcohol, and then finding out that my site was at the top of the search results for “cheap vodka” a few days later. Search engines were still pretty simple back then.

I’d come home from school and find out that my site was ranking for a new keyword, or that a new website had linked to mine and was sending a ton of new visitors my way. Fark.com was notorious for this back in those days. I can’t even count the number of times they’d link to a page on my site, send hundreds of thousands of new users in a single day, and crash whatever server my site was hosted on.

At the same time, I also had small business owners reaching out to me with offers of cash (or free products) in exchange for a link from my site to theirs. I noticed that they were very specific about the anchor text that I’d use to link to them. This was when I started to put the basic pieces of SEO together…

I was a regular on some webmaster forums, and I would often see discussions about folks using AdSense to make hundreds of dollar a day. Around that same time, I found software called PHProxy, a web-based proxy software written in PHP. I realized that folks could use easily use this software to access my website from school… and that there was a much broader demand to access popular sites like MySpace and eBaum’s World.

I registered about a dozen domain names and installed this proxy software on them, each with unique color schemes/branding, and linked them all together. The “exact match” domains (like myspace-unblocker.org) started ranking for their associated terms (“myspace unblocker”) very quickly, and the AdSense revenue started flowing… until the sites themselves got added to network block lists. I learned a lot about SEO (and VPS hosting… and selling domains!) through this experience.

Once I was in college, I found myself with less time for blogging, and those daily updates came a few times a month. I was studying graphic design, and ended up getting an internship with a marketing agency in Harrisburg, where I learned a whole lot more about SEO.

My college experience, as well as some international travel after graduating, helped me grow up a bit, and at some point it dawned on me these unfiltered rambling and silly gossip might be hurtful to others. It didn’t need to be sitting out in the open on a website for anyone to see. The internet had exploded in popularity since I first launched my site a few years prior. Social media was starting to take hold, and silly online rivalries (I was no stranger to these) could easily have real world consequences.

Being “the webmaster of a popular website” had become a core part of my identity over the years, and I struggled with the decision, but ultimately pulled most of the content down. It hadn’t aged well, and did not represent the person that I was becoming, nor the person to be as I entered the real world. I have some of that content archived locally, and frankly it’s embarrassing to look at ~25 years later, so I know I made the right call.

I still take great joy in publishing content on the web, and aim to share my writings on this blog a few times per year.

To be continued…

I majored in art (with a concentration in graphic design) at Shippensburg University and entered the workforce as a web designer. Through an interesting chain of events I found myself working in the SEO industry. I still have a strong background in graphic design, and find myself utilizing those skills somewhat regularly, but my true “honed” skills are in the search realm.

I take pride in my work and my ability to achieve results.

These days, I’m all about running, and I spend as much time on my local Bay Area trails as possible. I like to write about these adventures from time to time.

I’m always looking for a challenge, both in the workplace and the outdoors. If you have a project that you think I might be interested in, don’t hesitate to get in touch with me!