Hi, I’m Ethan.
I’ve climbed two active volcanoes, solved one of Einstein’s problems from 1907, and was called an “advertising insider” by Ad Age magazine[1].
I own Jadecraft, a luxury brand consultancy[2]. I’m an artist[3], zine maker[4], musician, voracious reader[5], film photographer[6][7], and probably more.
> Changelog
06/21/25: I kept going on my Sumerian Comparative Easy Reader, and added hotlinking capability and a full directory of all 381 (!!!) texts you can access through it. This has turned into a very fun project.
06/20/25: I read a lot of ancient Sumerian literature, so like anyone, I love the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature from Oxford. Unfortunately, that site goes down a lot. At first I was just going to mirror the files on my site, but then I figured, why not add some fancy features and a side-by-side comparison feature? Check it out: Ethan’s Sumerian Literature Comparative Easy Reader. An academic tool for ancient Near East scholars reading primary sources.
04/25/25: Yazto. The best Yazto online.
04/15/25: I added a guestbook. Sign in!
04/05/25: In a fit of procrastinating real work, I finally put together a page with links to my favorite external websites. I wanted the page to be more interesting than just some text list, and who’s going to scroll through a bunch of screenshots one after another? So I hope the way they’re presented on this new Link Field page is fun for you.
04/02/25: Working on a new site wing called Vydā Manas, for some looser and more philosophical short essay writing. The wing is still closed for now I’m hopeful for a launch by end of April–though all these dang quarterly reports at my real jobs are keeping me so busy.
03/30/25: Finally finishing the work I started on Dec 9 2024, I have now added alt attributes to every single image on my Photo Journal. A major win for accessibility. I also added a switch in the upper corner that lets you toggle them so you can see them in normal browsing! I LOVE this.
Actually, I did far more work on this site wing–I gave it a complete reskin to fix some lingering theme issues that the old one had. The new design is much stronger and more extensible. You may notice that it’s a little more fun and easy to browse. I’ve been putting that off for years, but I love how it turned out. Still more to do, though, and one of these days I’ll finally add all the photos I’ve taken since 2018! Hopefully before 2028 :-]
03/07/25: I made this gag “SEO Analyzer: One-Click Website Audit” tool. The joke is that it doesn’t even look at your website, it just does a whole analysis animation and spits out different results depending on where exactly you click the “Analyze” button. If you want a bad result, click on most of it. But you can get a good result from the far left side and a moderate result from the far right side. I would say it’s exactly as accurate as every other automated website audit tool out there! I also linked my tools section in the nav menu.
02/28/25: Lots of work on a new flashcard project as of late. Also adding some new wings to the site – something to do with security envelope art, something to do with reading zines, and something to do with silica gel packets. No links yet but more to come eventually.
02/17/25: I’ve had a couple custom-built SEO tools just for myself laying around for years, but I needed to share them with a team today, so I polished them up and expanded their functionality considerably and now have this cute little Internet Tools site section. It includes an XML Sitemap URL Extractor, an Hreflang Analyzer, and an HTML Element Analyzer. They’re all rather niche SEO workflow tools, but the URL Extractor is super useful to me and I’m proud of the chart features on the two analyzers. Very happy with these!
01/13/25: I’m safe from the LA fires so far! Today I made a tiny little update dealing with extracting individual year digits via PHP in the footer.
12/15/24: Massive update today. I created the cheat console. It replaces the weather effect buttons below, and adds tons of extra expansions, with more to come. You can click the button in the footer, or type a certain phrase at the website, to access it. Have fun.
12/13/24: Having the “Let It Snow” button on the footer is nice, but I kept thinking, wouldn’t rain be fun, too? So–I did that. Didn’t get the code from any other site this time, though ChatGPT helped with some refining (not that I didn’t have to totally fix and clean and adjust it regardless). You can now also toggle rain on any page from the footer. A very important update, I know. Warning: you can apply both the snow and the rain at the same time, but it may crash the page if you’re not equipped. Enjoy!
12/12/24: Been a couple days of more and more alt attributes and improvements on the Photo Journal. Just about halfway done with the alts on all existing posts. Right now they only go from 2007-2018, but I have more from 2018 and then through this year to add, too. But I will not add any new posts until all of the old posts are polished up and the site is re-designated complete!
12/09/24: (Nighttime) MAJOR updates on the Photo Journal. Starting to add alt attributes–a major undertaking with nearly 1,100 images on the site. Changed “Categories” & /categories/ to “Shot With:” and /shot-with/, marking a huge shift in how the site functions. Un-noindexed the category pages after updating the PHP and CSS to nicely display H1s, H2s, and descriptions on them, and popped in some text for each, to expand upon later. It will be very interesting to see how (if at all) this impacts the site’s performance.
12/09/24: (Daytime) Maintenance updates. Noticed that Google was indexing all of my WordPress upload directories, so I added Silence is Golden files to each. Forgot that I still had the Thoughts website up, which was made redundant by Trifles, so I redirected and took it down (memory screenshots here and here). Additional minor website health updates.
12/02/24: A very important update: I added a “LET IT SNOW” button in the global footer here, so you can toggle a snowfall over any page. ❄️ It’s a little slow on load, but that just mimics the feel of trudging through snow, it’s totally on purpose. Thanks to Zach Leatherman for the code and Simon Cox for posting it on BlueSky. I added the button and toggle functionality myself 🙂
12/01/24: I published my BrightonSEO Conference Day 1 and Day 2 journals on AdCavern! These are long posts that go through every talk I saw and every person I met. I also added my BlueSky social profile link to my About page, global schema, and footer. I even made that footer logo image custom myself!
11/24/24: My photo journal went down due to some weird WordPress update bug as it interacted with widgets. A hosting rep named Sergy O. helped load it back up, and then I messed around with the PHP in the wrong theme for too long before realizing where I was, then spent two seconds commenting out a line and it was all fixed. Otherwise, I’ve been spending all my time on my new wine site lately – super excited!
11/14/24: (Daytime) Created the Databank, finally bringing this project to life. Tons of work setting it up, formatting it, fixing bugs (esp. w/ footer), figuring out CSS grids, borrowing inspiration from Wikipedia, and making it look and feel so nice. Not ready to unveil yet–still needs a bit more work, and then there’s the matter of filling it with content–but SO EXCITED.
11/14/24: (Early morn) Tweaked colors even more. Can you tell I’m going through it? Added this here changelog to the website. Hired second developer to take look at scroll issue. Killed the whole Augmenarium section of this website and repurposed the one good blog post into its own page instead, about ancient Egyptian skeuomorphic design thinking.
11/13/24: Tweaked colors more. Developer couldn’t figure out the issue, quit.
11/12/24: Tweaked colors. Hired developer to troubleshoot mobile scroll issue on Photo Journal & Perplexia site.
11/09/24: Finally added photos of myself to my about page. Revamped and added a bunch to my friends page! More of my friends have websites again.
Previous: everything else on the website I guess idk
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Adventure
I try to keep a life experience blog, where I write about travels and adventures, and post photos. I call it EthanLore. Tbh it’s been years since I’ve updated it but I’ll get there soon, just you wait.
Some of my current favorite adventures are flying an airplane for the first time, and over Los Angeles too; building a computer from scrap I found in dumpsters; and discovering a secret shrine at Wattles Garden Park.
Most of my best stories aren’t in writing yet. I have so many it’s hard to find the time. I don’t even have any of my international trips on here, like when I explored the Crypt of the Capuchins or the Ruins of Atlantis (really!).
I also make a zine called Augmenalia.
Advertising
Sometimes I update AdCavern, my advertising blog, but only when I have something unique to say–for instance, how you should use longer title tags and think about trees more, or how Google knows what’s in your walls.
I had already been doing freelance consulting and SEO work for a decade when I officially founded my first company, Hulbert Marketing. Years later, I decided to transform my business into Jadecraft Luxury Consulting, so I could spend more time focusing on my favorite specialty: luxury brand clients.
I built my first website in 1997, and not long after that I was running websites with millions of views, pruning forums with tens of thousands of members, and managing hundreds of online staff. I’ve owned a few very large niche properties.
I’ve worked with some of the top digital & traditional agencies in the world, on thousands of individual clients, across dozens of industries.
Art, Photography, & Music
I draw, I sing, I play instruments, I shoot film, I paint, and so much more.
I have Perplexia, a digital abstract art gallery.
I have my personal little photo journal, from 2007 onwards.
Informally, I shoot film at Astral Gaze photography.
There should be more to come here, too.
And More
Here’s more about me. Plus all my weird miscellaneous stuff, which honestly is where a lot of the best parts of this big weird website live. This includes an essay I wrote asserting that ancient Egyptian stone columns are history’s oldest example of skeuomorphic design thinking.
Thank you for reading!