Inspired by Gina Trapani, Buster Benson, and others, I started to build my own Life in Weeks page from scratch. It looks pretty cool, and it’s interesting to see my life milestones presented on this scale.

But I’m not going to share it with you.

As I was building it, it became clear how much personal information I was sharing — and not just my own, but that of my parents, my sister, my partner, my child, other members of my extended family. It’s a privacy violation at best and an identity theft goldmine at worst. My life is mine, their lives are theirs, and these things don’t need to be published in public on the web.

This is, perhaps, an area of growth for me: Ben in his twenties would absolutely have published it. But our lives are like a fingerprint; unique to us. Not everything needs to be made available for free to everyone.

The code is pretty simple and the payload is lightweight (unlike Gina and Buster, I haven’t relied on Bootstrap, for example), so I’m going to find another use for it. Maybe a Life in Weeks for characters from my novel? For the web itself? I’ll think about it.