As I relaunch this website for the umpteenth time, I realized I’ve been blogging and maintaining a web presence since around 2005. I decided to investigate what kind of person I have been, online, over the years.
Here’s a trip down my internet memory lane.
2005 Vibes
Collin is nineteen, moving out of his Mom’s place, studying Computer Graphics at Purdue, listening to emo rock, watching anime, playing loads of Halo 2, working part-time in the accounting office of a Sam’s Club, and writing about all of it on LiveJournal. 1Fun fact, LiveJournal is now owned by Russian media company.
2007
Collin started a fresh blog in part because he decided to get an English degree and fancied himself to be a writer. Truly embracing the first half of Hemingway’s advice to “write drunk, edit sober,” he mostly wrote about consuming alcohol, watching movies, playing Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, and being absolutely broke nearly all of the time.
2009
Collin is now wrapping up undergrad, trying to find his way in the world. This site actually still exists and mostly highlights how totally stoked he was to travel Central America and get his scuba diving license. The banner photo is him climbing a volcano in Guatemala while wearing baggy cargo pants.
2010
Now he’s really leaning into the travel blog thing. He’s using Blogger to document his months in Southeast Asia, complete with a Google Latitude location tracker2Google Latitude was discontinued in 2013.
Each post has a several recurring features, including location, weather, days gone and remaining, “last thing consumed,” and “thought fragment.” His final entry also has a “Breakdown by Numbers” which includes the following:
Total cost (including airfare): less than $4,600
Cost per day on the ground: ~$17.25 (ranging from $6-60)
Weight lost: 18 lbs (From 158 lbs to 140 lbs)
Days abroad: 201
Distance traveled by land: 11,000 km / 6,800 miles
Total distance traveled: 42,600 km / 26,480 miles
2012
Collin is now 26 years old and seeking ways to escape the midwest. On the homepage he writes this, “blew apart my travel blog and my existing personal websites then reassembled the pieces in the most functionally attractive way possible.”
In an attempt to become less broke he also begins advertising web design as a service.
He further demonstrates that he has not aged out of his existential qualities.
2015
Collin disappeared for awhile. Sources say he initially planned to relaunch the blog because he had quit his job, but instead just wrote a bunch in Evernote and never shared any of it.
2016
Ah, no, here he is. He just moved over to Medium for a bit where he wrote about interplanetary politics and completing FreeCodeCamp while spending a winter in a cabin in Utah.
2017
Eventually he lazily redirects collinferry.com to this About Me page while trying to get his first engineering job.
2018
He finally puts something back on collinferry.com — a super minimalist (and rather bland) site presenting himself as boring and professional. This is a man who drinks Soylent.
He does have a poorly formatted Today page where we get a sense that he does, in fact, do things.
He then gets hired by Instacart, makes a small redesign with a new tagline, “Enjoy the present, play the long game“, and posts this to his Today page:
He then ignores the site entirely for five years, all the way through the pandemic, until the end of 2022, at which point the domain actually expired for several months. But now…
It’s 2023, and it remains to be seen whether we’re so back or it’s so over.
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