I started this website way back in 2002 as an easy way to share photos with friends. Back then there really wasn’t much by the way of social media. Sites like Friendster and MySpace popped up in 2003, but they were … bad.
Most of the photos from that era were from nightlife in and around the midstate. Downtown Harrisburg was just entering its early-2000s renaissance. In less than a year, Second Street transformed from a ghost town to a non-stop boulevard of bars, restaurants, and nightclubs. I even ran the lightshow at a now-defunct nightclub for a couple of years. To say there was an abundance of subject matter was an understatement!
Today I use floor9.com to journal my three biggest interests: rail trails, coffee, and technology. Pennsylvania is a goldmine of abandoned industry and railbeds. As more and more towns discover just how beneficial rail trails can be, new adventures keep getting made for the taking. And if that trail just happens to have a decent coffee house at the terminus, so much the better. TrailLink maintains a pretty good list of rail trails if you want to see where I’m heading next.
The site is hosted on high-performance AMD EPYC servers in datacenters in Ann Arbor Michigan and St. Louis Missouri. I use LiteSpeed for my webserver because it’s drop-in compatible with Apache and faster than nginx. The 10Gb uplink doesn’t hurt things either.
I keep floor9.com as privacy-friendly as possible. The independent, decentralized internet of 2002 is almost entirely gone today, but I do what I can to keep my content free and independent. I don’t do paid reviews, affiliate links (“we get a kickback if you buy this, but we promise that doesn’t affect our glowing 5-star review!”), SEO farming, or ad networks. I use Jetpack for analytics, but you can heavily restrict its ability to harvest data about you simply by using a good adblocker like uBlock Origin.