About

disassociated (usually all lowercase, sometimes all uppercase) sates a 1997 high-school like fascination with web design, and, for better or worse, has been transmitting from the east coast of Australia ever since. On and off, and in different formats, but it all kicked off in 1997.

If you’re up for it, check out the earliest, still existing, iteration of disassociated, here on the Wayback Machine. This is a capture made in February 1998, not long after I launched in 1997. The images are long gone, but their placeholders remain, so you’ll still be able to navigate around.

John Lampard

John. Jay. J. Whatever. I started out as a web designer in the late 1990’s. I was a founding member of the Australian Infront, a community of design creatives. In 2001 I was described as one of the first Australian designers online in the June edition of the sadly defunct Desktop Magazine.

I did a little magazine and newspaper writing. But I also wanted to do my own thing. To write and curate. To self-publish. To have my own masthead. I was in luck. By 2007 blogging’s star was rising. It might have been graffiti with punctuation to some, but neither I, nor countless other independent self-publishers, saw it that way.

disassociated

What’s in a name? The question comes up now and again. The word disassociated has a number of meanings, but in this context it means to do my own thing, to go my own way, to have my own gig, to be independent. The name somehow seemed a little more poignant when I took it back in the late 1990’s, when people were coupling their identities to all sorts of left-field domain names.

Self-publishing since 1997

On and off, that is. The facility to self-publish your own work or content, is what drew me to the internet in late 1990’s. In those days we to posted online journals, on our personal websites. When the term blog was coined, also in the late 1990’s, we all became bloggers.

disassociated was hand coded (WYSIWYG editors stay away please) with Notepad from 1997 until 2007, when I migrated the website to WordPress.

This web presence has been a few things over the years, personal website, web design portfolio, and blog, but it has remained a small, independent, publication. As a result, disassociated has been listed on feedle, ooh.directory, and as part of the Kagi Small Web initiative in 2023.

Some of my posts, and the links I’ve featured, have been referenced by the likes of Wired, Gizmodo, MetaFilter, ZDNet, VSAUCE, Web Urbanist, Reddit, and Wikipedia. One or two also reached Digg’s front page back in the day.

I’ve even made it into print, with American author Mark Briggs referencing my article about revenue streams for independent online publishers, in his 2011 book, Entrepreneurial Journalism.

Colophon, subscribe, support

Published with WordPress. Hosted by Dreamhost. Word, Excel, Notepad, Paint, Photoshop, FileZilla, Remember the Milk, and Notes, go into the production of disassociated.

Follow along through RSS, or for a non-syndicated experience try Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky.

There are ways to support disassociated if you wish to. If you take out website hosting with Dreamhost (I’ve been with them since 2007), I get a little something. There are also Amazon and Bookshop.org affiliate links, usually for books and movies, in some of my posts. I may receive a small commission if you decide to buy a product through any of them.