This website came out of a final project for J360 Multimedia Storytelling, taught by Claude Cookman at the Indiana University School of Journalism. It originally consisted of the J360 page, the J210 page and their related pages; the IDS spring 2009 page; the bio, contact, and résumé pages; a home page that looks nothing like what is there now; and a "welcome" page that served as the index page for the host server, mypage.iu.edu.

The site kept developing as I added pages for successive semesters at the IDS and as I studied abroad in Madrid. In late January 2011 I started the blog, the layout for which was inspired by The Big Picture and former IDS photographer James Brosher. That February I bought space at GoDaddy.com and moved my pages from mypage.iu.edu/~alefarri to www.alex-farris.com. (The "welcome" page still stands at mypage, if only as a placeholder.)

I've endeavored to code everything here on my own, down to building a script to automatically update the RSS feed. In March 2012 I learned how to handle a MySQL server and PHP loops, so now I have a fully self-coded blog with dynamically-updating pages and query-powered CMS files. In January 2013 I learned enough JavaScript and jQuery to build my own plug-in photo galleries, something I've wanted to do since the start of the blog. I'm still learning all I can, and I concede the blog comments to HTML Comment Box and the front page's photo loop to CrossSlide.

And, of course, all the photos here are my own, unless explicitly stated.