This website exists primarily because I have been tinkering with my personal websites since early in 1996 (which makes this something of a tenth anniversary site). After spending a couple of years (1994 & 1995) with my jaw on the floor looking at all the cool stuff on the internet, I decided that I had to jump into the fray and participate as directly as possible to what was going on.
In January of 1996, not long after BHII, a small Web hosting and development company in Southern California, changed their name to GeoCities, I secured my first web space in the SiliconValley neigborhood of that service. For two years I played around with that site, and enjoyed myself immensely while building several iterations of truly bad design.
In mid 1998, I built my first commerical website, for the tattoo and body piercing business I part owned at the time. ’nuff said.
In 2000 I secured my first personal domain name; www.eruditum.org. The development of this website represents the point at which I began to think seriously about information architecture and layout and design, as opposed to previous efforts, where everything was basically as much flashy cool stuff as I could cram in one place. Among these projects was a database of pipe tobacco reviews that I made public and invited people to contribute to.
In 2002 the Tobacco Reviews Database was spun off into its own domain, tobaccoreviews.com, and eruditum.org was not updated for a while due to tobaccoreviews taking up all of my free development time.
I spent the next four years tending to my websites and working as a developer, first under contract and later in a more permanent position as the chief web weenie for www.smokingpipes.com.
In 2006, along with everything else in my life, I decided to shake things up a bit and renovate my websites, so to speak. My earlier interest in information architecture, which had been sidelined by the day-to-day realities of running a successful high-load ecommerce site, resurfaced, and I began toying with the idea of developing a network of sites, each atomic enough to stand on their own, but as a whole representing something larger than the sum of their parts.
Currently I am working to bring that idea to fruition.