I first set up a personal web page in 1996, shortly after returning from a 9 month trip around the world. I did it mainly to learn html. Since I'm in the IT biz, I figured it would be useful to know.

It wasn't an outlet for any literary or artistic urges, or to give myself a platform from which to spread my opinions, but rather another tool for my more technical creative urges. I also recognized the usefulness for sharing photos and info with friends and family around the world.

By the time I went cycling around the Northwest in 2002, I was using it along with an email list to send regular updates and share my experience. But I still did everything the simple way, hand-editing my html files to add content to my pages. Then I finally got a digital camera in 2003, and had started hosting the pages on my own web server, so it was a natural thing to install photo gallery software. But I was still hand-editing the rest of the site, and not doing it very often - it was very out of date.

After my trip to New Zealand in Dec. 2006, I realized that if I updated it a little more often, and told more people about it, it might actually get used a little more. In order to make that simpler I followed the lead of my friend Allen, and installed a 'content management system' called  Drupal. Now I can add and remove stuff and have it look decent without having to hand-code each page. Drupal also ties in directly to my existing photo gallery server (called, appropriately, gallery ).

As for the domain name, notlost.org - well, all the good ones are taken, so I had to think of something!  It's a reference to the poem "All that is gold does not glitter", by J.R.R. Tolkien, from the Fellowship of the Ring. The second line reads "Not all those who wander are lost".  While the poem as a whole is about the character Aragorn, I think that line can be applied to many people and situations, including myself at times; Wandering, in all its forms, can be both a means and an end unto itself.

So here it is - an odd collection of stuff from my life online and offline over the years. I'll try to keep it a little more up to date, and please feel free to get in touch if you have any requests. Comments are welcome on any of the pages that let you post them. Many thanks to everyone in my life who helps make it fun and interesting, but notably to my family in New England, my friend Jeremiah for inspiring many interests I didn't know I had, and my New Zealand family , for reawakening a whole chapter of my younger life.

Peace,
-Chris

PS: Here's a larger version of the logo image in the header.