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. The name comes from my first apartment in downtown Harrisburg PA, which was on the ninth floor of Executive House.
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.
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 don’t even run analytics. IMHO, you should be able to read a post about coffee without social media algorithms tinkering with the news you see.