I'll Be the One Who Keeps It

My dad was the one who told me. I'd just moved my family back to Kansas City from D.C., and he was the one who called and broke the news that my website had been hacked. I went and looked at what was left of it.

That site was older than most things in my life. My dad set up the hosting when I was in high school, and I built the first version myself in Dreamweaver, because it let me slice up images and make image maps more easily than I could by hand. Back then I wanted to be a concept artist. I was deep into drawing and 3D work, and I was posting the same things to DeviantArt and Flickr that I put on my own site. The difference was that the site was mine. It was my corner of the internet, and only mine. I decided what went there, what didn't, what I said and how I said it, and I valued that.

It grew up alongside me. When I learned WordPress, it moved to WordPress. When I got serious about photography, it turned into a photo portfolio, and then into the front door of my photography business, and it stayed that for more than a decade. Around that time the site's design even won some awards and got noticed in a few corners of the internet. By the time it was hacked, it held almost twenty years of my history.

Once the shock wore off, I started digging. I went through cPanel and every corner of my own files, looking for anything that resembled a backup. My dad dealt with the hosting company, since it was his account. I don't remember the explanation they gave, only that both of us were stunned to learn there weren't any backups at all. I didn't blame anyone though. It was my work, and keeping it safe was my job. I'd just never done it properly.

The database was what hit hardest. I had most of the images somewhere else, but the database held the writing, years of posts, and a lot of things I'd moved into drafts because I didn't want them public anymore but still wanted to keep. It was the archive. It also held the Daily Photographer, a project I ran for five years, with hundreds and hundreds of posts. I had the photographs, but not everything I'd written alongside them, and I'd always planned to turn that project into a book someday when I got back around to it. When the site went down, that plan went with it.

The timing couldn't have been worse. I'd lost my development team to the war in Ukraine not long before, and I was already buried in teaching myself the engineering I used to hand off to them (that part is in GameDev: Yr.3). I had no room for one more crisis. That's how I learned proper digital discipline, the hard way, at the worst possible moment.

So I folded the rebuild into the computer science climb.

The hardest part wasn't technical. It was deciding what the site was going to be, because I'd decided years before that I didn't want to be a professional photographer anymore. Photography was going back to being something I did for the fun of it, rather than the paycheck.

For over a decade the site had been a portfolio and a business, and now it needed to become something closer to a lab: a workshop, a play space, a place that could keep changing and didn't have to bring in work. You're standing in what it turned into.

I built that version by hand, start to finish, with no AI tools. It was the first real demonstration of everything I'd been learning. The part I'm still proudest of is a small one: I wanted my icons and SVGs to respond to light and dark mode and the rest of the color theming, and it took me a long time to figure out how to make that happen.

I was really proud of finally figuring that out. I still use the technique today.

These days I run my own servers, my own backups and my own platform. I build pretty much everything except the hardware it runs on. Keeping it secure is ongoing work, and for better or worse, the responsibility sits entirely on my shoulders. In return, I can take it anywhere: build applications on top of it, make it huge or keep it small. It can be whatever I want it to be.

I eventually recovered a good amount of the old content. Not everything came back and, what did is still sitting in pieces. Posts and images haven't been put back together, And likely won't be for quite some time. Some of my earliest photo work was already gone before this, lost in a few other catastrophic data losses over the years (Did you know that hard drives typically only last 5 years? I didn't, until it was too late), so for a lot of it all I have now are compressed web versions, just enough to show I did something.

For what it's worth, I don't think the lesson is "trust no one," or that you should do everything yourself.

I'm not built for the bunker.

We're tribal.

We're supposed to have people around us, and I want that as much as anyone. But...

Inside all of that, I think a person should be able to stand on their own as far as they possibly can. Not to leave the tribe. To be someone the tribe can lean on.

Vanguard leans on me. My clients lean on me. My family leans on me. And these days I lean securely on myself, because nearly everything holding up what I do (apart from the hardware) came from my own hands.

I handed the things that mattered to me to someone else to keep, and one day they were gone.

So now I keep this house in order myself.