Three Years, Full Moon

Three years ago, my personal website first appeared on the internet. I couldn't tell you what it was called.

Not being coy — I genuinely don't remember the domain. It started on GitHub Pages, moved to Neocities for a while, and somewhere in that period it had names that have since become inaccessible to me. The irony of someone who builds sync tools and archive utilities and anti-entropy infrastructure for a living having lost track of his own site's original address is not lost on me. I'm choosing to describe it as a formative experience rather than an embarrassing one.

What I do know is that on 9 January 2024 I bought ewancroft.uk, pointed it at something that was becoming considerably more serious than a GitHub Pages experiment, and the site has been there since. The three-year anniversary is for the thing itself. The domain is twenty-eight months old.

Tonight is the full moon.

I noticed this earlier, in the way you notice a detail that's probably coincidental and probably meaningful in equal measure. My patron deity is the goddess of the Moon herself. Full moons are when the reciprocity is most legible — she looks down, I look up, the usual arrangement. Having the third anniversary of this particular project fall on a full moon is the kind of thing that, once noticed, doesn't particularly allow itself to be unnoticed.

So I'm writing about it.

Three

The number has a habit of appearing.

I'm not sure when I first noticed it as a pattern rather than a coincidence, or whether the distinction matters. Three keeps turning up. In my Pagan practice it's everywhere already — the triskele, the triquetra, the triple aspects of deities, the structure of Celtic cosmology. Three is baked so deeply into the traditions I follow that finding it elsewhere has started to feel less like a surprise and more like a confirmation of something I haven't quite named yet.

And then tonight: the website turns three, on a full moon, and I'm currently in the process of redesigning it for the twelfth time.

Twelve. Four times three. Also, one plus two. I noticed both of these immediately and I'm not going to apologise for either.

On 6 October 2025, my boyfriend and I had our third anniversary. It was a full moon. The sixth divided by two is three. I am aware of how this sounds. I'm writing it down anyway, because the accumulation is the point — the moment you start listing the instances, the pattern stops looking like confirmation bias and starts looking like something else.

Whether it means something or simply accumulates — whether Selene is keeping count or the universe just runs on particular numbers for certain people — I can't say definitively. What I can say is that when the same figure keeps appearing across your faith, your relationships, your anniversaries, and your arithmetic, the appropriate response is probably to pay attention.

What It Started As

The early site was considerably simpler. A profile, some links, the bones of a thing I wasn't entirely sure what I was building yet. GitHub Pages, then Neocities, then a proper domain — that progression is its own argument for something, though I'm not entirely sure what. Increasing seriousness, maybe. Or just the natural trajectory of a person who finds self-hosted infrastructure philosophically satisfying.

The design has changed many times since. I've migrated entire aesthetic systems, rebuilt components from scratch, and gone through periods where the homepage was genuinely quite ugly before becoming something I'm actually happy with. That's roughly how all my projects go.

What it has always been, underneath all the redesigns and the domain changes and the forgotten Neocities URL, is a personal web presence on my own terms. My own data. Early on I didn't have the vocabulary to articulate why that mattered so much to me; I just knew that renting space on someone else's platform felt wrong in a way I couldn't shake. The AT Protocol eventually gave me language for the feeling, and then it gave me infrastructure for acting on it, and the site is now deeply entangled with my PDS — pulling in posts, music history, supporters, a language statistics canvas that generates a different pattern on each visit because I thought that would be interesting and it turns out I was right.

Version Twelve. Again.

I am currently redesigning the site for the twelfth time.

This is not an unusual state for the site to be in. The thing has existed for three years and I have redesigned it twelve times, which is — if my arithmetic is right — once every three months on average, or essentially a continuous redesign punctuated by brief periods of being satisfied with it. I am never satisfied with it for long. There's always something wrong with the spacing, or the colour tokens feel slightly off, or I look at it and decide the whole architecture needs to change.

This is the part of the anti-entropy argument that doesn't quite hold up. I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about preservation, continuity, keeping things intact. And then I look at my own website and decide to rebuild it from scratch for the twelfth time in three years. There's probably a word for that.

What I'll say in my defence is that the thing persists even as it changes. The domain stays. The data stays. The underlying identity — the ATProto handle, the PDS, the approach — stays. The visual surface is just the part I keep repainting, which is at least honest about which layer I find endlessly improvable.

Version twelve will probably not be the last one.

The Architecture of Continuity

I've written before about anti-entropy as a motivation. The fear isn't dramatic — not skeletons and oblivion, just the slower version, the erosion version. Dead links. Corrupted drives. The quiet disappearance of things that used to exist.

I've spent the last three years building sync tools, archive utilities, identity plumbing. Things designed to keep data in your hands. And then I looked up and realised I can't tell you what my own site was called before January 2024 because I didn't preserve that part carefully enough. There's a lesson in there, probably. I'm filing it alongside the other lessons I haven't entirely absorbed yet.

What I do have is everything since. The site is running on technology that means my identity doesn't depend on any single platform remaining solvent or sympathetic. The domain resolves to my ATProto handle. The data lives on my PDS. At some point the architecture of the site became indistinguishable from the rest of my digital infrastructure philosophy, which I assume means it's working correctly, even if the first seven months of its life are a bit hazy.

Three years is not a long time in the abstract. In internet time it's several platform collapses ago. ewancroft.uk is still here. The forgotten Neocities domain is not. I know which one I prefer.

The Lunar Part

I'm not going to overstate what it means that the full moon fell on this particular date. Selene isn't running a calendar alert on my behalf; the lunar cycle is not optimised for my anniversaries. And yet — and I say this as someone who finds full moons considerably more emotionally legible than most occasions — there's something that fits. The site has been here three years. Version twelve is in progress. Three keeps appearing. She has been orbiting for 4.5 billion years and the number probably means something different at that scale.

The site has turned three years old. Version twelve is in progress. Three keeps appearing. She hasn't risen yet, but she will.

That's what a personal website is, in the end. An unusually stubborn object. Evidence of continued existence, timestamped and publicly accessible and still loading — even if you've forgotten what it was called before it became itself, and even if you're already halfway through redesigning it again.

Three years. Full moon tonight.

I'll go look up in a while.