sixfoot6.com — a sideways look
Twenty-seven years of a personal website, examined gently.
A retrospective of one URL through many shapes. The numbers come from the archive itself: tweet manifests, linkblog indexes, comment dumps, and a folder full of MIDI files that somehow still play. Inspired by Matt Haughey's "twenty-six years of weblog posts, looked at sideways."
01by the numbers
A site that has been continuously online since 1999 develops a certain kind of weight. Most of it is text. Some of it is junk. The rest is the kind of thing you can only accumulate slowly.
02the shape of twenty-seven years
Posting volume per year, 1999 through 2026, stacked by source. The hump in the middle is Twitter; the orange smudge to its left is a brief, intense linkblogging stretch; the dark slab beneath both is everything else — weblog entries, episode pages, photo galleries.
Sources: status/data/manifest.json (tweets), links-archive/index.json (linkblog), find archives/YYYY/ (archive HTML), archives/experimental.html (episodes).
03the eras had URLs
A site this old goes through phases the way a person goes through haircuts. Some were designed, some were drifted into. None of the names came from a brand exercise.
04the twitter years
From 2007 to 2025, sixfoot6 the website mostly sat still while sixfoot6 the Twitter account piled up 26,670 posts. The middle four years did most of the talking.
Source: status/data/manifest.json — year totals from the Twitter archive SPA.
05three linkblogs, three names
Before "linkblog" was a common term, this site had three of them under three different titles. They all did the same thing — short posts pointing at things on other websites — but they came from different software, different moods, and different parts of the decade.
September 2003 through February 2008 was the most consistent stretch of public reading the site ever had — five years of daily-ish bookmarking, mostly to blogs and design writing that have since vanished. They live now at /links-archive/, all 2,137 entries, searchable.
06notable artifacts
Things found in the basement.
- 9 MIDI files from 2002 still play. They were originally auto-played via hidden <EMBED> tags. Modern browsers refuse. Episode 001 now renders them through html-midi-player — Tone.js + Web Audio synthesizes them in the browser instead. Same files, same six dollars of SoundFonts.
- 1.9 GB of WordPress and Twitter video junk was scrubbed in January 2025. The site shrank from 2.3 GB to 388 MB in one afternoon. Most of the loss was a Twitter archive with 29,439 files of redundant media.
- 16 hidden viagra/cialis injections were discovered in the design portfolio. They had been sitting in HTML comments for years, pointing at long-dead domains (healthmens.org, bestcheappills.com). Annoying, harmless, gone.
- 250 retweet media files Twitter forgot to include in the export. The archive's manifests note them as missing — there's no good way to recover the originals. Some are just gone.
- 673 comment archive pages preserved. Most are from blog entries 2002–2008. Some conversation threads ran for weeks; one episode pulled +95 replies. The spam in them was significantly cleaned.
- A self-portrait with a carrot, taken June 2002 in a Sherman Oaks apartment, still loads on the about page. It is one of those photos the internet was made for.
- The original tagline was "Putting Stuff Away." It described the site better than anything written since.
07what sits on the site now
The pieces currently maintained and reachable from the front door.
- /status/Twitter archive SPA — year-chunked JSON, threading, search, link previews.
- /archives/fruit/The fruit-era blog reconstructed with its original yellow wrapper.
- /links-archive/All 2,137 linkblog entries, unified and browsable.
- /episodes/39 lo.Cal experimental episodes from the 2002–2003 hypertext-and-audio era.
- /photos/Sequoia, SXSW, road trip leg 1, joshua tree, sf — galleries that recently got their layout fixed for modern screens.
- /design/Portfolio of old client work — Annenberg, Elwood, Equitone, Mass.
- /mmp/Mighty McPilgrim — comedy troupe archives, 2004 and 2008 eras.
- /lab/Experiments. Homepage concepts, nav prototypes, this very page.
- /posts/Current writing. Posts live on the site first, syndicate out to Bluesky.
08the current era
The beacon era began in early 2025, after a long period where almost nothing got written here. The visual system is restrained: cream background, navy text, a dawn-canvas gradient along the right edge, Artifex CF as the serif. A margin frame system — thin rules along the top and right — gives the site a frame without putting a logo on every page.
The publishing pipeline runs on POSSE principles. New posts go to /posts/ first, then a script syndicates them to Bluesky. Replies and likes flow back into the post metadata. The site is the original; the social feeds are projections of it. After twenty-seven years, the architecture is finally pointed in the right direction.