A little about this website
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In 1999 I registered the Conaway.org domain because I wanted to claim 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 personalized website address, and for the 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 know a little 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 online. Everyone was just 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 a pro model.
I knew that I would need to do image editing and graphics on the site, so I bought a copy of Photoshop and found some online tutorials for how to use it. I did the same for video editing, with Apple’s Final Cut Pro app. 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 files to the server.
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 stuff is usually the impromptu, casual shots captured when no one is posing or expecting it. And the more shots you take, the higher your 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 all of it.
~ Stacy
Updated January 2026
Made with 🧡 in Katy, Texas