He created Cool Site of the Day in 1994, when the web was small enough that finding good things in it was itself an open problem, and daily selection was a reasonable answer to it. In 1996 he founded Project Cool with Teresa Martin, turning the practice into an institution with an audience and a method. In 1998 he co-founded the Web Standards Project, by then arguing about infrastructure rather than discovery: the web had grown large enough that incompatible implementations threatened what it could become.

Astounding Websites, in 2000, was the last curation vehicle. Two years later he said on the record that the frontier was gone — “I’m a frontiersperson, and the Web is not a frontier anymore. It is simply a place” — and left. The absence lasted twenty years and is not treated here as an interlude. It is the clearest evidence the site has that continuity is not the same thing as activity.

He returned in 2022 with Verevolf, sixteen essays written across three months, kept here at their original dates and in their original voice. The writing led back into building: first images, then systems that made them repeatable, then characters meant to outlast a single session. Adaptive Continuity followed in 2026. The question moved: from what the web could become, to what persistent artificial systems can become given memory, continuity, environment and time. The instruments changed. The disposition — go where the frontier is, document what you find, keep the receipts — did not.

The middle name is the continuity. It is carried in the byline for the same reason every claim on this site carries a source.

Sources for each line Walk the spine