I suppose the traditional way to start a new blog is with “Hello World.”

Which feels especially appropriate when the project I’m starting a blog about involves spending an unreasonable amount of time digging through all the other places I said hello to the internet over the last 25 years.

Welcome to Wygle Wide Web.

This whole thing started as an attempt to answer a fairly simple question: How much of my life can I reconstruct from the digital trail I’ve left behind?

It turns out the answer is an alarming amount.

I’ve been online since the era when having a website usually meant somebody had taught themselves enough HTML to make terrible aesthetic decisions. Over the years I’ve left pieces of myself scattered across Blogger, LiveJournal, MySpace, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, old websites, dead websites, email accounts, hard drives, photographs, videos, audio recordings, abandoned creative projects and probably several places I haven’t remembered yet.

Some of it survived.

Some of it disappeared.

And some of it only looks like it disappeared.

That’s where this project gets interesting.

I’ve been using ChatGPT as a research partner to help me excavate all of this stuff. We’ll find an old reference in an email, which leads to a dead URL, which leads to the Wayback Machine, which leads to an ancient video player, which leads to me staring at Safari’s network inspector at one in the morning trying to recover a video I made in 2011.

This happens more often than it probably should.

Along the way, the project has become about more than recovering files. The artifacts lead back to people, places, projects and versions of myself I’d forgotten. Sometimes they correct my memory. Sometimes they explain it. Sometimes I find something and think, Oh. That’s where that came from.

So I decided I needed somewhere to document the excavation itself.

Naturally, tonight I built a blog.

With AI.

Because apparently we are committing to the bit.

I started with WordPress and asked its AI site builder to make a home for Wygle Wide Web. It initially wanted to make something considerably more website than I wanted, so we kept stripping things away.

Eventually the direction became very simple: dark background, Courier Prime, two columns, posts on the left, little sidebar on the right. Mostly words. Occasional pictures. No giant hero images. No testimonials. No “OUR SERVICES.” No button imploring you to START YOUR JOURNEY.

Basically, I asked a 2026 AI website builder to make me something that feels a little like a Blogspot somebody cared about in 2000.

Perfect.

That’s what this site is going to be.

Not the finished archive. Not an authoritative autobiography. Not a carefully polished museum of my life.

It’s the field journal.

I’ll write about what I’m searching for, what I recover, the weird technical routes required to recover it, the memories the artifacts shake loose, the things ChatGPT and I figure out, and probably the occasional spectacular dead end.

There will be old photos.

There will be forgotten websites.

There will almost certainly be broken links.

And because the internet apparently has a sense of humor, someday this blog itself will become another artifact in the pile.

So:

Hello World.

Again.

— Adam