Blog Post #296: 10th Anniversary of gabrielrhenals.com!

Earlier today, my father Alonso E. Rhenals was discharged from Baptist Hospital after an alarming syncopy event but he recovered quickly and is now back at home after a multi-day stay on the Baptist campus.

We used to semi-regularly watch a weekly television program called Computer Chronicles throughout the latter half of the '90s and early aughts and if I happened to catch an episode of the tech-focused series outside of his company, I'd always report back about any noteworthy content.

One morning in 1999, I woke up early and watched an episode showcasing a free website design and hosting service called Homestead (remarkably, still in operation since 1998). So enraptured by the invitation to design my own website, I was spurred to action once the segment concluded and signed up with the then-nascent web creation platform! After an entire day of template customization and primitive image scanning, the result was The Garnobian Outpost; a simple repository of early artwork and self-styled reportage about my creative happenings - and movie news.

The site persisted for a few years and a few top-to-bottom redesigns before I eventually ceased its caretaking and let it fall into defunctitude. Still, the impulse to fashion personal websites would later take the form of some less flashy, HTML-based examples throughout college and evidenced in my eager adoption of the blogging service LiveJournal and then more contemporary social media like Facebook and Instagram.

These days, however, less and less exists beyond our ubiquitous, individual black monoliths (a 2001 reference). Social media rules these days. So, gone are the halcyon days of personal, desktop-based website creation which now seem like quaint relics of a nearly bygone era. A tear?

Despite the dominion of social media, in 2016, I engaged my thirst for yet another desktop-based web design caper after my university career advisor recommended establishing a personal website as a kind of online portfolio to aid in my employment search underway at the time following my graduation. After weighing my options, I settled on Wix to design a new site to the beat of their highly customizable templates and I was soon off and running with another parcel of land amid the vast interwebs. Far more discerning and detail-oriented than I was during the heyday of The Garnobian Outpost (I was only 13 years old at its conception), I approached the development of this new personal website with great energy and exactitude. In late November of that year, I registered the domain gabrielrhenals.com and linked it to my Wix confection. This time, its promise felt different and lasting.

Since breaking ground on gabrielrhenals.com ten years ago, the maintenance of this virtual habitation has been regularly time consuming, involving constant iteration and the consideration of hundreds - maybe even thousands - of details over the past decade. It has grown from representing only my short film catalog and some writing samples to now offering information and media on those aforementioned short films in addition to that of four feature films, two series, two books and an album; a rich variety of miscellaneous items also on offer.

Some of the latest additions of content exclusive to the website are a near-exhaustive collection of academic writings and an ongoing series of write-ups devoted to my routine reading habit. And when nested menus were introduced to the service some years ago, the possibilities of what I could effectively include grandly grew.

However, in the flurry of optimizations and in the wake of the release of my first book, I had to sacrifice a somewhat redundant section featuring an assortment of writing samples. But that's the only material I've excised over the intervening decade. While I expect the site will continue to parallel my creative life in output, I am nervous about adding too much more. There are limitations despite my most clever, minimalist efforts.

Extensive in creative content and indefatigable in persistence, gabrielrhenals.com is intended as a representation of work produced almost exclusively by a single person with no top-down oversight while employing cheap and easily accessible resources. This essential (and familiar, if you know me well enough) anarchist ethos defines more than the website but it explains why it's grown far more expansive than a mere tool for employment purposes - as earnest as that motivation once was. At least in my view, it is its own work of art and a clear demonstration of immense creative labor.

When I think back to my time in middle school with a curious new creative node to talk about, I recall how it prompted so much interest and engagement from friends and acquaintances (and even a bowled-over teacher or two). It occasioned the formation of cherished memories and greater social exchange between young people with little else between them except this product of the most amazing technological opportunity. So, gabrielrhenals.com lives on with a share of that recurring gusto, utility, motive and habit.

To conclude, I would like to thank every visitor to my website, both long-time visitors and newcomers, on this little decadal milestone. I never forsake the immense privilege and luck of time and means required to keep it properly maintained and, beyond that, produce the very work it is largely intended to serve as curation for.

More to come! Thank you!

A time capsule! gabrielrhenals.com in 2019!