Wygle Wide Web

A quiet field journal of digital archaeology. Reconstructing a life from 25+ years of digital traces, with occasional help from ChatGPT when things get weird or surprising.

  • I Found the Blue Skies

    Over the last few days I reconstructed Chasm, a 28-song playlist I made when my marriage ended. I had always understood it as a collection of songs that could wreck me, but going through it one track at a time with Song Why‽ made the structure clearer. Chasm wasn’t just sad music. I built it…

  • The Wayback Machine Had My Missing Child

    In 2011, I had an idea called All Cameras On. The idea was pretty simple. Everybody suddenly had a camera. Not a good camera, necessarily. This was 2011. Your phone might shoot 720p video if you were fancy. Somebody else might have a point-and-shoot. Somebody might bring a DSLR. Somebody might be holding a Windows…

  • Song Why‽

    I accidentally invented game. It goes like this: I give ChatGPT a song I love. Not necessarily my favorite song. Just one that has stuck around. Something I keep returning to, or something that immediately makes me think of a person, a room, a road, a period of my life, or occasionally absolutely nothing I…

  • WordPress Is Easy, They Said

    Today I learned that WordPress has spent the last twenty years solving problems I did not know I had. I wanted a blog. Not a website. Not a publication platform. Not a content-management system with reusable patterns and global style presets and template parts nested inside groups nested inside columns nested inside some other thing…

  • I Was Tweeting Before Twitter

    One of the things I’ve noticed while going through Adam At Last, the blog I started when I was 20, is that I apparently had already invented Twitter. Not Twitter Twitter. I would like my billions of dollars anyway. But mixed in among the long posts about music, girls, work, God, girls, music, girls, and occasionally something other…

  • Hello World, Again!

    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…