My name is Jason Pettus and I was born in 1969; I currently count the American city of Chicago as my home, although am doing an increasing amount of both domestic and international traveling every year. I have pursued a number of different professions over the years; in high school, for example, I studied computer programming, then studied fine-art photography in college (the University of Missouri-Columbia), and then pursued a career as a creative writer during my first ten years in Chicago (1994-2004). These days what I mostly do with my time is run an arts organization I own, called the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography.

New readers should be aware that this is a confessional personal journal, and that I frequently discuss sensitive topics in an explicit way here -- my bisexuality, my atheism and my political opinions among the more controversial ones. My sex life is often discussed at this journal, sometimes in pornographic detail; and you should be warned that my opinions frequently clash not only with political conservatives but also liberals as well. Although I firmly believe that it should be every adult human's right to view whatever creative material they wish, all of the above should be kept in mind before sending a child to this website or recommending it to them.

About this website

As mentioned, from 1994 to 2004 I pursued a career as a creative writer, including publishing my first novel in the summer of 1997; this site was first opened in December of that year, almost exclusively to promote that novel. The journal was first added in the fall of 1999, originally because of reading that it was a good way to increase traffic to a personal website; a year later it began getting reprinted at AvantGo.com, a third-party company which provided web content to mobile devices, back before mobile devices had wireless internet capabilities. Both because of this AvantGo version and because of my growing literary success, readership soon swelled; by the end of 2001, for example, when I was still doing my journal daily, there were over 20,000 unique individuals reading each update. (Sorry, but I no longer keep detailed records of how many people visit, mostly because I'm no longer pursuing a career as a creative writer so it doesn't really matter. For those who are curious, I estimate somewhere between 5,000 and 25,000 people that read any given entry here now, with that number swelling to 20,000 - 35,000 while I'm updating from other countries.)

The first eight versions of my website were found at my old Geocities page, which is where I originally established the site in winter of 1997; this was before the age of Blogger, LiveJournal and other companies, of course, and also when Geocities was still known as the home of a lot of legitimate artists. Because of the size and bandwidth limitations there, though, I was always spinning off certain standalone projects and storing them at a variety of short-lived free hosts around the web. In 2000 one of my readers, a site host and designer named Jimi Sweet out of New York, graciously offered to host a permanent home on the web for me if I wanted, and even to take care of a fancy-schmancy URL for it as well. I took him up on the offer, and since then the majority of my standalone literary work (the electronic books and hyperfiction, in other words, and the HTML pages that accompany them) have appeared at the pages where you are now. (The URL has been known by a variety of names, based on when I've had money and have felt like updating it, all of which are now dead or point to other sites not affiliated with me - ilikejason.com and readadamnbook.com are the ones probably still mistakenly typed in the most.) I left my journal, though, at the original Geocities location, because Geocities has a web-based interface where I could edit the entries easily from internet cafes (versus the FTP-only access I had at this main site).

In the spring of 2004 I received my first wireless mobile device, a palmOne Treo 600; suddenly, for the first time in Chicago, I had home internet access and a way to interact with my email, the web, etc. I learned, in fact, that software existed to let Treo owners send and edit new entries straight to their journals (now being called "blogs") straight from their device, via Application Protocol Interface (API)...but only if your blog is being run by an automated "type engine" service, such as Blogger (Blogspot), Six Apart (Movable Type, TypePad, LiveJournal), etc. And Geocities is not being run by such a service, but my main website now is, because of Jimi very kindly installing Movable Type (MT) for me. Which meant that it was time for even my journal to move over to this main website as well, and for almost everything I've produced to be found here now too.

For the first year of this new MT version, I was updating it almost exclusively from my mobile device, and wasn't able to do much else (besides the Jason Pettus Instant Locator™, that is, also designed for mobile use). Now that I do finally have a home broadband connection, though, there is now a lot more I can do on the internet, and that I do, and let others follow along if they want. Check the front page of my website for the most current list of online projects I regularly update.

About this version

This is version 12.0 of my personal website; that is, the twelfth distinct visual look I've designed for its interior pages, in the nine years of it now being online. This version first went live October 9th, 2006. It was programmed in HTML 4.1, with of course referencing special MT tags, laid out and displayed using the CSS2 protocol. (This is the second version of my site, by the way, to be laid out entirely with CSS2.) The Jason Pettus Instant Locator™ is simply a second MT-powered blog I maintain; I use the free plug-in MultiBlog to display it at my main site.

This site is resizable; a well-designed layout should appear no matter what width your browser, or size of mobile device. It's degradable; a well-designed layout should appear no matter how old your browser or computer. It voluntarily complies with the Americans With Disabilities Act; it is correctly and quickly translated in aural and Braille browsers, and the text size can be easily enlarged on the user's end without disrupting the layout. I make my CSS stylesheets available publicly, for any who want to copy and paste specs to their own; you can click here for a downloadable list of them all.