25 Years of John & Kristie

BOTHELL, WA :: Today, Kristie and I celebrate our 25th anniversary! To mark the milestone, I decided it was time to relaunch johnandkristie.com!

Over the years, our stories had become scattered. Some lived on our original website, while many more were tucked away in Facebook posts and photo albums. Together, they tell the story of our shared life: family milestones, travels, hikes, projects, celebrations, and all the special moments in between. I wanted to bring those memories together somewhere we could browse, enjoy, and keep adding to them.

What sounded like a website refresh turned into a couple of months of intense learning, inventorying, organizing, recovering, redesigning, and rebuilding – with millions of Codex tokens consumed along the way!

The project brought together our original site and nearly a thousand Facebook posts and albums, along with more than 16,000 photos. There was plenty of sorting involved: choosing cover photos, organizing stories, combining posts from the same event, and making sure the pictures belonged with the right memories.

Videos became a project of their own. Many of the copies saved by Facebook were lower quality than the originals, so I tasked Codex with searching through my iCloud, GoPro, RAID, and our other archives to find the original versions. Hundreds of videos were matched, uploaded to YouTube, and connected to their stories here.

I also worked to bring over comments and replies. Those conversations are part of the memories too – little notes from friends and family that are lovely to come across again years later.

You can explore the site by category, sort posts in a number of ways, search for a particular memory, browse our adventures on the map, or see the latest conversations on the Recent Comments page. The site is also finally responsive and mobile-optimized.

Celebrating 25 years feels like a wonderful reason to revisit where we’ve been and preserve these stories for the years ahead. If you’ve been part of our adventures, you’re part of this history too.

There’s still some tidying up to do, but I’m excited to finally share it! In the gallery below, the last two images compare the new version to the old version of the website, using the same "Twins!" post – which had been frozen in time as the last update for 16 years – until today! Sorry it's taken so long!

Take a look around, revisit an old favorite, and leave us a comment. We’d love your feedback!

Here’s to 25 years of memories and many more adventures to come!

✖