My first website was built in 1996 using Microsoft’s FrontPage and it felt like the whole world was about to change. GeoCities and AngelFire were fun, but they felt constrained compared to Macromedia Dreamweaver. I published a blog by posting articles on top of one another on the same page, adding additional pages when it got too long. You can imagine my excitement when Blogger came out!

There was finally a way to publish individual posts without manual HTML, but it didn’t give you much control beyond that section. Dreamweaver was purchased by Adobe and licenses were less affordable, and Apple’s iWeb make it easy to build simple sites without much ado, but there was something special about the content focus of blogs that excited me.

Enter: WordPress. I’d heard about it for some time prior to giving it a try and I eventually signed up for my WordPress account in 2009. I was in love with the plugin concept from day one and became enamored with the expansion of available themes, so much so that I ended up working for the parent company of StudioPress in 2011. I’ve been professionally involved in the community ever since and more than ever, I believe open source is the future of the internet and I’m so grateful to be able to contribute toward its growth.