For the longest time we thought we would never bother creating a family website. The only reason we even reserved a domain in the first place was so that we could have stable e-mail addresses--and that was only after what the evil jerks at Earthlink did to us former Netcom shell account users.

However, a few years ago, we noticed the alarming growth of social networking sites. MySpace and Facebook began to perpetuate the Eternal September by enabling any moron with a mouse to create “websites” using ghastly collections of multimedia clips, illiterate rants, animated-GIF smileys, and grainy, low-resolution, out-of-frame and out-of-focus photos snapped with cellphone cameras. Add to this mess the advent of Twitter and the ability for twits of any age to blast out 142-character missives of vapid pointlessness, and you have the modern Internet. The promise of meaningful communication, collaboration, and social discourse subsumed in a sea of digital noise.

We have chosen to be different. We have tried to create a website for what we hope is meaningful communication with our friends and family. No tweets, no online statuses, and no annoying MIDI music. Nothing here is password protected. You don’t have to be on our “friends” list, and you don’t have to friend us. In fact, with the exception of the previous sentence, we promise we won’t ever use the word “friend” as a verb.