Essays & Marginalia
Notes from the desk — on what the early web looked like, how it sounded, and why so little of it survives in a usable form. Posted irregularly.
2026
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Webring Aesthetics, 1997–2002
A study of small-network design at the height of the personal-homepage era.
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On the Loss of the Guestbook
The guestbook was a strange thing — a piece of social software built before we had a word for it.
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A Note on Tile Backgrounds
In defence of repeating, low-contrast textures, and the readers who lived with them.
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Three Lessons From the Internet Archive
What I've learned from twelve years of pulling pages out of the Wayback Machine.
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Reading the Web Like a Book
Notes from a reading practice I have kept for the last four years.
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A Smaller Internet
Why I am building this archive, and what I think it might do.
2025
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The Last GeoCities Mirror
On the German archivists who saved most of what we still have.
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Footnotes, On the Web
A craftsman's note on building footnote-driven prose for a screen reader's ear.
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A Year of Slow Posting
What I learned by deliberately posting fewer than ten things in twelve months.
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Marginalia as a Genre
Toward a small theory of the side-note, with examples from old library books.