I registered Lyza.com on the 18th of May, 1997. I don’t know that because I wrote it down, or because it has enough weight with me that I remembered it on its own accord. I know because an ICANN lookup today told me so.

The Internet Archive took its first snapshot of Lyza.com on March 31, 2001. I could call the time between 1997 and this 2001 crawl the Dark Ages of Lyza.com, but I don't. Instead, during those years, everything was wonderful and ugly.

Basically I wrote a bunch of blog software. Again. But I still wasn’t calling it that because I was intent on reinventing a galaxy full of wheels. Tada! It’s Celeste! Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

I dreaded this post in the series about Lyza.com’s history because I thought I’d be describing the site’s embarrassing Dark Ages, two years when my content wasn’t hosted on my own site, followed by a couple more years of something that looked even less considered than an afterthought. I had it backwards.

For several months in 2009 I developed a feverish hobby: meticulously crafting a visual design for Lyza.com down to the last pixel. Then I applied that lush coat of glamor to my existing content. I call these the Beautiful Years.

I used to say anything to everyone. That ended in the spring of 2011 and I flipped inside myself, pausing for a few years and then reducing my entire site to the minimal thing possible when I couldn't avoid it anymore.

Lyza.com came back with aplomb from its almost-nothingness in the summer of 2015, decked in pank. It was hand-crafted. Blisteringly fast. Exquisitely tuned. And fundamentally boring for lack of any real content.

For several years my pank content machine sat idle, ravenous. Cyclical guilty impulses dogged me: I should do something about my site, I should update my site. Finally, a forcing function.

This did not end the way I expected.