Build and launch your own website.

“I have been creating content on the web for as long as I can remember. In fact, I had launched my first website after taking an HTML class as an elective in college. At the time, in 2006, the web was a completely different place. There were no tools for newsletters, social media was much less prevalent in our culture, and those who spent a lot of time on the web were considered “weird.” As I built the first website I had ever created using raw HTML and iframes, I remember looking at it with extreme disappointment - it was much rougher around the edges than I had envisioned in my mind. Having a good idea of what other websites looked like, I knew I could do better.”

“I created the website, but had no idea what to do with it. I used my new pulpit to tell a random story of two battling buskers on the subway. I didn’t know what else to write. I didn’t post again for four months. After about a year of posting on-and-off, I decided it would be fun to write news stories. If an article caught my eye, I’d do some more research and publish my own blog post on the topic. Here’s my “review” of the iPad 2, and here’s a random article about someone that wrote a Whac-A-Mole virus. Why not post news articles on my personal blog? I just thought it was fun. A year after that — so two years since first launching my first website — I published an article that would change my life: Body Hacking: My Magnetic Implant. It blew up, hitting the top of Hacker News and getting republished (with permission) by Gizmodo. It was that Gizmodo byline, as well as the news content I’d been writing and self-publishing, that got me my first full-time staff writer position at Laptop Magazine a little while later.”