Contact Me
Aloha. Have a great day. Mahalo.
That was very nearly the whole page. Underneath those three lines sat a four-field form — name, email, subject, message — and a sentence promising to get back to you as soon as possible. It was one of the first pages published on the blog, three days after the first post, and it stayed there unchanged until the end.
Why there is no form here
This is a restored archive of a blog that stopped publishing in 2012. There is nobody at the other end of a contact form, and there has not been for a very long time. Putting one on the page would be pretending otherwise, so the form is gone and so is the email address that the disclosure page used to carry.
That is a deliberate choice rather than an oversight, and it applies to the whole restoration. Pages are rebuilt at the addresses they lived at, with the content that was actually published, minus anything that would let a visitor try to contact or transact with a private individual. A restored site is a record. It is not a shopfront and it is not a forwarding address.
What contact actually looked like here
In practice, almost nobody used the form. This was a blog whose entire correspondence happened in public, underneath the posts, and the people who read it every day were the same few dozen who ran blogs of their own. If you wanted to reach Thom you left a comment, and you got a reply on your own blog the next morning. The form existed for the one thing comments couldn’t handle: the monthly comment contest required a winner to make contact within twenty-four hours to arrange the prize, and rule 5 pointed them at the form on the sidebar to do it.
That is worth noticing, because it is not how sites are built now. There was no newsletter signup, no lead capture, no chat widget, no analytics goal attached to the contact page. There was a form, and its job was to handle the two or three situations a year that a comment thread couldn’t.
Reading the rest of the site
If you arrived on this page from a link somewhere — and given its age, that link is almost certainly on somebody else’s blog rather than in a search result — the front page sets out what this place was, and the readers page explains what has and hasn’t been restored and why.
The site’s disclosure and privacy policy and its licence page are both here as well, since both were part of the original page menu.
The rest of the menu
The page menu changed a little over three years, but its spine did not. Alongside this page it carried the disclosure policy, the licence page, a thank-you page addressed to the regulars, an awards page full of badges, and an index for the Keoki and Lani story series. Two more came and went as the features they explained came and went — the contest rules and the Portrait of Words guidelines.
What is not in that list is an about page, and its absence is not an oversight. There was never one. The nearest thing to a biography anywhere on this blog was the tagline at the top of the screen and whatever leaked out through three years of daily posts, which turns out to be a great deal more than a page of it would have been. Personal blogs of this era frequently worked that way: the writer was established by accumulation rather than by declaration, and by the time you had read a fortnight of posts you knew the important things without anyone having listed them.
That is also why this restoration has not added one. Writing new biography for a real person from an archive is not restoration, however carefully it is done, and the rule applied across this site is simple: restore what the snapshots showed, and nothing beyond it.
Hey, it’s only my opinion.
A Hui Hou