The story

A short history of Todd55h

A homepage I started in the fourth grade that somehow turned into a hobby, a career, and, all these years later, this.

  1. A late-90s bedroom at night: a beige CRT glows with a colorful "Welcome to Todd55h, under construction" homepage.
    1997

    maxpages.com · versions 1–5.5

    It started with a name that wasn’t taken

    It began the way a lot of good things did in the late nineties: I was in the fourth grade, all my friends were making homepages on MaxPages, so I made one too. I wanted maxpages.com/todd. It was already taken.

    They offered me a few alternates, and I picked one almost at random. That was the whole ceremony. A corner of the web got a name, and the name was Todd55h.

    It all started back in 1997 when all my friends started to make websites on maxpages.com. maxpages.com/todd was already taken, so they asked me some choices of other names and I picked Todd55h.

  2. A dusty beige monitor in a sunbeam showing a glowing green visitor counter; a little cat asleep on the keyboard.
    2000

    the counter kept counting

    I left it alone. The counter didn’t.

    Then, like a kid does, I wandered off. For about a year I didn’t touch it at all. When I finally came back in 2000, something funny had happened while no one was looking.

    The little visitor counter at the bottom of the page had climbed and climbed. To this day I have no idea who all those people were.

    About a year later I had stopped working on the site and never worked on it till 2000, but by then my counter on the Todd55h hit the roof. Don’t ask me how.

  3. A vintage suitcase covered in travel-sticker logos for Homestead, Tripod, GeoCities, Angelfire, Port5 and more, beside a notebook of hand-written HTML.
    2000–2002

    maxpages → homestead → angelfire → port5

    A new home, and a new name: T5h

    The free web was always shifting under your feet, and when it was time to move on I packed up, shortened the name to T5h, and kept going. Over those years the site rolled from MaxPages to Homestead to Angelfire to Port5, and eventually, much later, onto servers I would run myself.

    Every move taught me something. I picked up HTML by hand, one tag at a time, and turned into a happy little tourist of the early web, setting up a fresh home wherever the next adventure led.

    Webmaster Todd quickly picked up a new language called HTML.

  4. An early-2000s CRT showing a turquoise "T5h: Click to Enter" Flash splash, with floating balloons, a Game Boy, and a Zelda-style overworld map.
    Aug 1, 2003

    T5h Version 9 · on Port5

    Version 9, and a splash screen like everyone had

    This was the high-water mark. Back then almost every site greeted you the same way, with a splash page: just the logo and a single link that read “click to enter,” a little bit of ceremony before the real site loaded. That was simply how the web worked at the time, so of course mine had one too.

    Behind it sat T5h version 9: a turquoise Flash intro, a Zelda overworld looping in the background, and an almost-daily blog. After something like ten different layouts, this was the one I was sure I’d finally finish, and I loved every minute of making it up as I went.

    After making about 10 different layouts for T5h, I decided to just keep it simple. As I’m typing this I’m just making things up as I go.

  5. A slightly open desk drawer full of floppy disks and CD-Rs hand-labeled v9.1, v10, vX and TOTAL, with a black cat peeking in.
    over the years

    version after version after version

    I could never stop rebuilding it

    Here’s the thing about Todd55h and T5h: I could never leave them alone. I rebuilt the whole site over and over, more than ten versions in all, each one a fresh start with a new look and new ideas. One would go live, I’d get restless, and I’d start the next one.

    I still have every single one saved, all the way back to the beginning. Reading them back, version by version, is exactly how this page got written. The site you’re on right now is really just the newest version in a very, very long line of them.

  6. A beige CRT glowing at night with a fantasy-themed "Dragon Siblings" forum, a little dragon mascot and a list of message-board threads, a desk lamp and a soda can beside it.
    2004

    a new obsession: DragonSiblings

    When the hobby found a community

    Around 2004, Todd55h and T5h drifted to the back burner, because I’d fallen down a brand-new rabbit hole: a site and message board called DragonSiblings.

    I poured myself into it, building templates and forums and layouts late into the night. It’s where the hobby stopped being just mine and turned into something other people actually showed up for.

  7. A school computer-lab desk at night: a beige CRT shows a "New Project" window, a yellow sticky note reads "FBLA site DUE", an FBLA pennant and a "Vintage Tech" poster hang on the wall, with a backpack, headphones and a soda nearby.
    2006

    FBLA · the assignment I didn’t want

    The website that changed everything

    Senior year, peak senioritis. My computer teacher, Mrs. M, had watched me take half a dozen of her classes (keyboarding, desktop publishing, all of it) and decided I was going to enter the FBLA website-development competition whether I wanted to or not. I really, really didn’t.

    For a solid month she kept reminding me. Eventually it came down to an ultimatum: have it done by Monday, or there’d be a consequence. I told her that wasn’t how the world worked. She just said we’d see. That Saturday I finally sat down to build it, and once I started, I couldn’t stop.

    I told her, “You can’t do that, that’s not how the world works.” She just said, “We’ll see what happens on Monday.”

  8. A beige CRT showing a colorful "Welcome to Hertzton, USA" town homepage with a blue lake, and on the desk a gold first-place trophy and a blue FBLA prize ribbon.
    2006

    Hertzton, USA

    I built a whole town

    The brief was a website for a fictitious town. I could’ve done the one I lived in, but I liked the freedom of making it all up, so I built Hertzton, USA: a whole little Midwest city with a 500-acre lake, a business district, real-estate profiles, even its own fake news. My dad had spent years photographing our real town, so I had a whole media library to build the place out of.

    Then the competition actually started. At county, somehow, the judges gave me first place. That earned a field trip two hours west to a convention center, where I got judged all over again.

    Website development is near the end of the alphabet, so I sweated through almost an hour of other categories, quietly dreading the walk up on stage. They called the places one by one until I realized I was the only name left. The lights came up, the big screen lit, and: “First place, website development: Todd.”

  9. A cozy desk by a window: a beige CRT showing a bright blue cloudy sky, a "Max Pages: The World Wide Web" book, a smiley-face mug, a leafy plant and a little cat figurine.
    2006–2014

    the hobby becomes a career

    From the bakery counter to the IT department

    At the time I was working the bakery counter at a big grocery chain, saving up for a computer-science degree. Somehow word of the win reached the store managers, who passed my name up to corporate, and the next thing I knew I was printed in the company newspaper that goes to every store and every employee.

    That got me an interview with the company’s IT director, and an internship the summer before college. The pay was better and the opportunity was too good to pass up. After the summer they offered me full-time and worked around my schedule, so I could take classes locally and make up the hours. I did that for almost eight years.

  10. A cozy modern desk at night: a laptop and a phone showing a colorful app being built, a code terminal, and a small FBLA pennant on the wall.
    2012 →

    still building

    Apps, and a skill that never left

    That job led to others, and around 2012 I became an iOS engineer. I’ve been making apps, for companies and for myself, pretty much ever since.

    The web skills never went out the window, either. I still build sites all the time. Which is how, after all these years, the itch finally won out and I decided to bring this one back.

  11. A cozy modern desk today: a flat monitor showing a calm blue sky full of clouds, a tall plant, and a black cat asleep in the sun.
    2026

    todd55h.com · self-hosted on caddy

    The name comes home, bigger than ever

    What started as a fourth-grader’s homepage turned into a lifelong hobby, and that hobby quietly turned into a career. Funny how that works.

    Worth saying plainly: Todd55h was never the popular one. It never drew the crowd that DragonSiblings did, or the following my friend Vanessa’s music earned. It was always just my place to tinker, to try things, to blog, to show off whatever I’d taught myself, and to be myself out loud. Which is exactly what this is, too.

    So here we are again, hand-built from scratch, finally on its own domain and self-hosted on a little Caddy server I run myself. Only this time I’m not just rebuilding the site. I want to use it to document my whole life: every trip, every project, every memory I can possibly dig up. It’s going to take years, and it’s never really going to be finished. Honestly, that’s the best part.

    This story will most likely never end. Todd has added more and more to it every year.