This adventure started in early 1996, when I was eager to establish a home page for myself, after having just put one up for a college organization I was a member of. But I had no idea what kind of page to do, so I asked myself, what do I have? Well, I thought, I have my family... and the rest is history. The original intent of our family site was to be a place where relatives in other parts of the country could keep tabs on us. Originally titled "The Wright Page", the name of the site was changed to "the Wright Stuff" in the late 90s, based on the recommendation of a friend. I started referring to the site by its domain name, "shawnwright.com" in 2005, and phased out "the Wright Stuff", as I felt it wasn't unique enough to be found in a search.

shawnwright.com, currently in its fourth (and then some) incarnation, was developed fresh — no, by hand — using good ol' (X)HTML and PSPad. Graphics were created and/or manipulated using Jasc Paint Shop Pro. Though I am capable of creating fairly complex websites, I decided to keep this one on the simple side, since I don't have an exuberant amount of time for upkeep. With this in mind, version four was designed to be cleaner, leaner, and easier to maintain. Continuing this goal, the next version will evolve further, as my time permits, with the full implementation of cascading style sheets, server side includes, etc. I've been slowly moving that direction for literally years. Maybe I'll get there someday.

What I have been able to do somewhat over the years is integrate tools as seemlessly as possible into the site. Some of the features integrated into the site include:

• Bravenet Counter - For visitor stats
• Blogger - For the News blog
• DotComments - For blog commenting
• gVisit - For blog visitor tracking
• LoCalendar - For sports/activity schedules
• Slooze - For the family album
• EasyPHPAlbum - For quick/automatic listing of photos and images used in the blog
• 1 & 1 Internet - Can't forget our web host (we only pay $5.99/yr for this domain!)

Other tools I'm working to integrate:

• phpGedView - So our geographically dispersed family can coordinate updates
• freeCap - So that we can stop feedback spam and re-enable the site feedback

Our site has never really received much attention or recognition, not that we seek it, but was selected as the featured family site for the week of 11/01/98 at the Family PC Fun site, which also runs in the Dallas Morning News, Sunday Edition. Thanks to those guys over there that think our site is pretty spiffy. Our site was also pictured (though not covered) in a 6/27/99 Daily Oklahoman story, At Home on the World Wide Web.

Thank you for stopping by our site, we hope you enjoyed the relatively uneventful ride.

Your host,

Shawn M. Wright
meshawnwrightcom