I've been taking photos in San Francisco for about 25 years, mostly of graffiti, signs, buildings, and various urban landscapes. For a long time, I've maintained an Instagram account where I post images from my print archive, as well as from the thousands of digital pictures I take every week on my iPhone.

But I got tired of social media about 3 years ago, with the exception of the occasional post on Instagram, and keeping my LinkedIn profile up to date. I didn't really like the performative nature of posting on Facebook, and I've never really done much on Twitter except follow people I thought were interesting and fend off multiple offers (and threats) from people who want my username.

I had bought the callaghan.org domain back in the 90s, and haven't really ever done much with it beyond pointing it at my tumblr or my about.me profile.

Getting laid off recently gave me a little motivation to build my own site. I wanted a work portfolio where I could be more descriptive than on LinkedIn about some of the projects I've worked on. But I also wanted a place to be more creative about posting photography, drawings, and general thoughts in a more intentional space than social media, and in a digital space that I own.

So I'm pretty stoked to finally be putting together an old-fashioned blog. Made sense to me to build it on WordPress, and I decided to use Semplice, a theme that specializes in building visual portfolios, and allows for almost infinite customization without writing too much custom code.

I have another domain at which I'll be hand-coding another website using an SSG (more on that later), but this allowed me to get up and running pretty quickly once I mapped out what I wanted.

I won't be breaking news on here, but hopefully this space will allow me to share stories about the stuff that interests me the most. Like technology. And signs.

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