The personal Website of Andy Schön of New York. Now in its 16th year on the Web.
As I began redesigning and updating Andyland in 2008, I realized suddenly that for the first time the age of Andyland was nearing half my age. And having been my casual personal Website for almost half my life, Andyland had accidentally but quite organically become a pretty decent autobiography without me even realizing it. It sounds so obvious now - that that's what a personal Website's changing content eventually becomes - but being that the Web is pretty much just as old as Andyland, I guess I hadn't seen it coming.
The contents of the various incarnations of Andyland over the years are the many photos and stories that do so well to capture the zeitgeist of each time. But at this point, they're not all that well organized for presentation as such. You mostly have to know where to look and snoop around or find stuff by accident. And there are several years here and there where I didn't really put up any new content at all. And then, of course, my first 17 years aren't covered so well.
So I decided to remedy these by reorganizing all old Andyland content into an online autobiography format, while also taking a considerable amount of time over the course of the coming months or years to fill in and amend my autobiography with contents and media that had never been on Andyland in the first place. I'll scan in old childhood photographs and interview my parents, for example, to fill in things about me as a very young child that I may not remember well. I'll link up my genealogy research (something I've long been procrastinating putting online) since my ancestry is what naturally leads up to the story of me anyway. And I'll include lots of reflection on my past as well. Imagine if your great, great grandparents had done this - what a treasure it would be to read. For that matter, imagine if your spouse or significant other, or your child, had done this - imagine how much better you'd be able to learn about and understand them if you so desired, if you had that kind of resource about them.
I think most folks' first reaction is that this is an even 100 times sillier idea than that of just having a personal Website in the first place. But I think most folks will end up liking it a lot, albeit for various reasons. After all, if you're here reading this, there is some reason behind why you decided to spend the time to do that. And I'll bet even more confidently that if you're reading this far, that you'll not exit Andyland here but rather spend even more time clicking around and reading about my life in this section of Andyland. So there. :-)
Anyway, it's true that only time will tell the extent to which I'll actually carry out this idea. I'll be the first to point out that not all of my great ideas actually see fruition. So in the meantime, I've already produced a few flagship pages/sections focusing on some key aspects of my life. These are considerably less detailed than I'd like to eventually produce as part of this project, but for the time being, these'll do.