A shell is a home you carry

This site lives at a .sh domain, which means its name parses as a shell script: a small executable, a prompt waiting for input.

I like that a shell is two things at once. In computing it is the layer you speak to — the thing that takes a terse instruction and makes the machine move. In the tide pools it is the house a creature secretes around itself and then carries everywhere, because leaving it behind is not an option.

A personal website should be both. Something you can address directly, that does things when spoken to; and something grown slowly from the inside, a calcium record of whoever lives there. The rest of the readings folded into this particular name are confessed, where such things belong, in the colophon.