20 Years of Casabona.org

Last updated: January 22, 2025

It’s hard to believe that 20 years ago, I was sitting in my Sophomore year dorm room at The University of Scranton (Redington Hall, bay bay!) when I bought this domain.

And naturally because I was 19 years old, I didn’t keep some record of why I made the decision. I did “officially” announce it 6 months later.

I suspect part of it was because I owned domains with words like “sugarbob” (a Homestar Runner reference) and “Joey.” If I was going to be taken seriously, I should have a professional-looking domain.

While I wanted casabona.com, that was registered 8 years prior by a woman named Helen, who still owns and operates it to this day.

I’ve tried many times to purchase it from her, but now I’m excited to see it hit 30.

In any case, I got the .org instead.

Rebuilding the Memories

Since I didn’t keep a good record of January 2005, I’ve been scraping together what I could through the Wayback Machine and other means.

I don’t even have a screenshot of the first Casabona.org. It didn’t really feel like a big deal to me at the time — just like the guy who sent the first email doesn’t remember what he sent.

The original goal for Casabona.org was to be a portfolio and online home for projects, pictures, services, and school work.

The pictures archive was a fun project, though I started using Flickr that summer. Of-course, now I’m considering bringing that back.

The Original Design

I was never good at designing websites. And the way I learned HTML was by building something in Microsoft Front Page and then looking at the HTML.

That was until my friend Stephen Mekosh showed me Notepad.

As a result, I was pretty adept at copying HTML from websites I liked and modifying them. I almost definitely did that with Casabona.org, using Alex King’s personal website as the model.

This also wasn’t a WordPress site, despite starting to use WordPress the previous year— back before WordPress even supported pages!

But this was still a dynamic site using PHP, which is the reason I was on campus in the first place.

Formalizing my PHP Knowledge

While I have my Master’s Degree in Software Engineering, when it comes to web design, I’m largely self-taught. I made my first website around 2000-2001 for my parish.

I learned PHP in Winter 2004 (thanks to this fantastic book and my first semester in college learning Java) so I could make better websites. But I decided to take a “Dynamic Websites” course during Intersession 2005 (an accelerated semester between Fall and Spring) to “formalize” my PHP skills.

The best thing to come out of it was Casabona.org because I wanted to apply what I was learning, and my personal blog was using WordPress. I also didn’t want to use my web design services site as a sandbox.

This made me realize the problem I have today (where should I put this stuff on the web?) was a problem I’ve always had.

My Many Domains Problem Existed Back Then Too

Even at 19 I had too many domains. There was Casabona.org, but there was also my personal blog, which we’ll call, “Joey,” and my website business domain, jlcwebdesign.com.

“Joey” served as my blog and my first foray into WordPress. I owned it until 2011, though I moved the blog over here in 2009 or so. That site dated back to 2003, when I was still in high school.

JLC Web Design was my first formal offering for web design services, though that rebranded several times, until I made it Manifest Development, then closed it officially in 2020.

I’m finally solving the “too many websites” issue this year, and Casabona.org will be the canonical place for all of my stuff.

Some General Thoughts on Being on the Internet 20+ Years

I remember while I was teaching a college class, I remarked on how my first website was a Geocities site that I called my “Bootleg Blogger.” I copied a Blogger template and updated the static site manually.

A student found the very embarrassing blog on a site that automatically backed up all of Geocities when it got shut down.

He graciously did not share it with the rest of the class. That site got a very formal-looking cease and desist demanding they take it down when my polite attempt did not work.

If you end up perusing this site, you might notice that older posts have a note on them. I was 15 when I made my first website, and remained pretty immature until my late 20s.

The internet was a weird place in the 2000s. For many, it was the first time we were given the ability to truly express ourselves to a wider audience. And most of us took advantage to the fullest degree.

As a result, there’s a lot of stuff here that I no longer believe. It would be problematic if my views at 39 were the same as at 19. And while this isn’t a perfect archive, it’s still one I’d like to keep largely in-tact. Call it an heirloom of sorts.

The internet is a strange mix of ephemeral and permanent. Most of what you do on it will be forgotten in a short amount of time. But if something catches, it could stick with you. I think we learned that collectively over the course of the last 20 years.

A Record of Growth

My life has thoroughly changed since this site went live. I went from wondering if I’d ever find love to being married with 3 kids and a dog. I still had a thick NY accent; that has softened as I’ve moved throughout PA. Professionally, I went from software developer to podcast and automations coach.

My viewpoint has almost entirely changed.

I remember a family friend telling me around this time that, “young people are supposed to be liberal, then get more conservative as they get older.” He told me this because he felt I was “too conservative” for my age.

When I was 19 I was a strong-willed, opinionated, know-it-all. My older blog posts show that completely.

Some people still describe me as that; the best I’ll give you is 2/3.

Two months before this site went live, U2’s How to Disassemble an Atomic Bomb came out. My friends and I were obsessed with it.

There are a few lines that have truly stuck with me for the past 20 years. They’re from the track City of Blinding Lights:

The more you see, the less you know,

The less you find out as you go.

I knew much more then, than I do now.

It’s easy to see the world only as you’ve experienced it when you’re younger. You’re so sure things are the way they are because of your narrow lived experience.

But as you get older, you should see and experience more. As a result, you become less sure of what you know, but more open to learning.

Much more recently, I came across an idea from Dr. Jane McGonigal in her book Imaginable. She shares the idea of, “strong opinions, loosely held.”

I like that. It’s important to be thoughtful and have opinions. But it’s even more essential to know understand that with additional information, you should be willing to change those opinions.

If there’s one wish I have for this website, it’s that I’ve demonstrated that over the last 20 years…and that I’ll continue to over the next 20.