A Missive from the Front Lines of the Personal Digital Content Space
FROM THE BESPOKE STATIC SITE GENERATOR OF TYLER LOHAN
Those who have been reading teenware.net since it was started in 2011 know that I started it after John Gruber featured my essay “Actually, Teens Hate Trixel.ly” on his quintessential blog Daring Fireball, calling me a “youngster with a real eye”. I hoped to have a chance to explain how someone born the year that Steve Jobs made his triumphant return to the mothership engages with the best hardware and software in the world, and for 4 years I’ve done that while partnering with the best ad network in creative, web, and design culture to raise awareness of fantastic new products from independent innovators and companies that really get the user experience. It’s been a wild ride.
I had my doubters along the way. My dad, for instance, has never really understood what I was trying to do, no matter how many times I explained it to him over the dinner table, his wife Ashley poking at her inferior Android phone the whole time, playing whatever flavor of the month game Zynga was pushing through bulk-rate display ads, the kind I swore to all of you I’d never have on any site I wrote for.
It is with great regret that I announce that the inevitable has occurred: the day of my 20th birthday has passed, and so I must retire both the teenware.net domain name and this phase of my life. No longer do I have desirable opinions about Apple, Snapchat, or Nintendo. Once I turn 21 I will be a “twenty-something” and can maybe convince the Wall Street Journal that that’s valuable. For the next twelve months I am a twenty-nothing, cast out into the demographic desert, and so I must do my time and hone my craft until I can be of value to the world again with my revolutionary product writing.
I shouldn’t complain, though. I’ve been lucky. As an independent content creator I managed to do far more than just iterate on my “share a teen’s perspective” approach that frequently landed me that coveted Daring Fireball “Linked List” item — as of this month, generally as many times as twice a week. I knew, though, that I had to be more than that one trick pony. It took some time, but eventually I learned with encouragement from my mentors that my tastes in finding the absolute best product in every category was something that a huge audience of awesome readers was dying to read. And it’s the way I think about the world that makes it possible to bring links to great stuff that people love into their Twitter feeds every day.
I’ll give you an example of the kind of stuff that keeps me awake at night, but leads to the pageviews that turned me into the writer I am today: there’s no “speed entry” mode on the microwave Ashley insisted we get when she had the kitchen remodeled on dad’s dime. I’ve taken to microwaving things for 55 seconds when they ask for 1 minute because it’s faster to enter (cook-5-5-start vs. cook-1-0-0-start). It’s important to find these kinds of shortcuts in life so I can get back to work sooner, and if my food isn’t entirely hot, I know I’m still getting what I need to let me do my job. And how do I use that extra time? To research microwaves, of course, since I was woefully unprepared when the subcontractors came in last July. I won’t make the same mistake once I get my own place. I will have the best microwave or I will eat my food cold.
There were certainly rough times: when Dad and Ashley forbade me from cooking sous vide in the new kitchen last summer, claiming that I’d “blow a fuse”, despite the fact that I had cleared it during construction by researching the most feasible home system and presenting Ron the electrician with a binder of the full specifications of what I had in mind, a binder I later found on the floor of our guest bathroom after he told me it “all looked great, kid”. Luckily I was able to commandeer the high school science lab thanks to Mr. Toth, my former AP Chem teacher, and I only had to explain to four of my former teachers why I was “back”. The steak turned out perfectly, as you all know. More importantly, my tutorial post broke all my previous traffic records, the biggest thing I had written since my epic takedown of the LG Nexus 4. This taught me that adversity can be overcome with a little creative thinking, just like Steve Jobs did when he created Mac OS X and handed it on a silver platter to a public that thought Windows XP was the biggest revolution in digital product design.
I wrote about my personal life, too, and found a real connection with the readers: you all were there for me when I bent my iPhone 5 practically in half and Ashley screamed at me about “not being careful”. I wasn’t sure at the time if sharing my emotions was wise, but I was just so mad:
I’m careful with everything I own, Ashley, because I appreciate all of the UX design that goes into each hand-selected product I buy. Maybe what you didn’t realize, since you’re too busy reading TMZ, is that the iPhone 5 was rushed to market due to unfair pressure from greedy retailers hoping that Apple would save them once again from a world where their middleman status is threatened by genius companies that have figured out how to design and sell their own work. In two weeks, when the Today Show is running a pull quote without attribution from my blog and calling it “Bendghazi”, maybe you’ll understand what I’m dealing with.
I was never able to thank you all enough for raising funds to buy me a new iPhone 5. It was really amazing, and that new one sits in a drawer in my desk not 2 feet away from me while I type this (along with the famous “Bendghazi” Patient Zero they showed a photo of on Good Morning America and the iPhone 5S that came out 8 months later — but I gotta say, I loved that thing for the first nine months of 2013.)
So what’s the plan for the next year? Move into my own place and populate it with the best things. I mean this quite literally — it is only after I’ve verified that a product is the best in its class that I will let it set foot in my new apartment, a 1-bedroom over on the east side that Dad’s realtor friend helped me find. Dad and Ashley call it a “hole” but I know that once I’ve found the best gear that the world’s most thoughtful product designers have been able to bring to us and I’ve hung my collection of mint-condition vintage Apple “Think Different” posters, it’ll feel like home.
The podcast will have to go on hiatus, obviously, since I’ve been recording that in the guest room and Ashley said that the first thing she’s doing when I move out is tearing down all the “gross” baffling (it’s not for looks, Ashley) and turning it into a yoga studio. I don’t have the acoustics in the new place, but I’m looking at renting some space from a local startup in stealth mode that offers people quality recording space for podcasts. They promised me I’m first on the schedule if I promise to write them up on the new site (my brutally honest take, of course — the founder, Connor, said he’s a fan of the site and “totally gets what [I’m] doing”.)
Overall I think 2015 will be an exciting time, and in 2016 I know I will emerge as a thought leader in the personal digital content space, and will also finally legally purchase and consume my first beer — once I’ve figured out which is the best one.
