This is a personal blog. It has been running, on and off, since 2000, which makes it older than most of the platforms it has complained about.
There are around 2,400 posts here. They started on Greymatter, moved to Movable Type, and have been on WordPress for years now; you can still find the old categories from each era if you dig. The early stuff is a lot of links, a lot of nights out, and a running joke about spam. The later stuff is mostly Amsterdam, bridges, and whichever social network was collapsing that month.
I’m a Brit who moved to Amsterdam in 2017. If you want the work version of me (what I actually do for a living, where I have worked, things I have shipped) that lives at 8letters.co.uk. This page is deliberately not that.
About the photographs
A few hundred posts here were originally published straight from Instagram by a plugin that embedded Instagram’s own image URLs rather than saving the files. Those URLs expired, and the pictures quietly vanished from every one of those posts. They have since been recovered from my own archive and are now hosted here properly, which is the entire argument for owning your own website in one paragraph.
What used to be on this page
For about twenty years this page carried a cheerful account of my date of birth, the hospital I was born in, the schools I went to and the streets I grew up on. I spent a career in advertising technology, implementing the EU privacy directive at one employer and GDPR and CCPA at another. All of it while leaving a full set of answers to my bank’s security questions on a public web page with my name at the top.
I have taken my own advice and cut it. If we have met and you’re trying to work out whether this is the right person: yes, probably, and some of you still call me “world”.
Say hello over on 8letters, or in the comments.