A little about this website
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In 1999 I registered the Conaway.org domain because I wanted to reserve the name before someone else took it (Conaway.com was already taken). Anyone could register any name that was available, and as long as you renew the registration every year, it’s yours. I wanted it for two reasons: to own a website address, and for personalized email addresses (@conaway.org).
I had just begun teaching myself HTML (HyperText Markup Language, the underlying code of web pages) and how to manage a web server so I could publish something for the family, not knowing at the time what that would be. But I thought it would be good to have our own little space online to preserve some memories and share with family.
At the time there were no platforms like Wordpress or Squarespace that would handle the coding for you, so you had to learn HTML if you wanted to put something on the web. I learned a lot by looking at the code others were using online and started to figure out how it all worked. It was fun because there were so many creative people building sites and doing really interesting things, and you could learn a lot from that. And it was an exciting time because everyone was just really starting to figure out this World Wide Web thing and what you could do with it. Anyone could publish anything, any time, and immediately make it available globally. We take that for granted now, but the internet really is an amazing achievement (A Short History of the Web).
Around that time I was also getting into digital photography with my Kodak EasyShare DX3700 camera — one of the early digital models — so I just started shooting everything and making web pages. Later on I upgraded to better cameras (Sony, Nikon), but in recent years I have been using my iPhone because the cameras are so good you don’t need an expensive pro model.
Knowing that I would need to do image editing and custom graphics on the site, I bought a copy of Photoshop and found some online tutorials for how to use it. I did the same for video editing, using Apple’s Final Cut Pro. Everything is hosted on my Dreamhost VPS (Virtual Private Server) except the videos which are hosted on Vimeo and embedded into the pages from there. I use BBEdit text editor for the code and Transmit FTP to copy everything to the server. Good tools make your workflow work.
As of January 2026 there are over 8,000 photos on the site, and I don’t know how many videos. My master photo collection is maintained in Adobe Lightroom Classic, where we have over 32,000 photos going back to 2000.
One thing I have learned about photography is that the best shots are usually impromptu, casual photos captured when no one is posing or expecting it. And the more shots you take, the higher the odds of catching something special, so shoot a lot.
I’ve been lucky to have such wonderful people and moments to photograph over the years. Family and friends, beautiful locations, birthdays and vacations and holidays and silly life moments.
~ Stacy
Updated January 2026
Made with 🧡 in Katy, Texas