Megnut.com is the personal website of Meg Hourihan. Started in 1999 as an all-purpose blog, its focused switched entirely to food in May, 2006. In 2008 it returned to being a general blog, mostly about my life in New York City raising my two kids, with some tech thrown in, and food thoughts for good measure. Some times I talked about other things like travel. Updates slowed waaaay down, and around 2013, stopped entirely until September, 2018.
I am (was?) an internet entrepreneur and co-founded Pyra Labs, the company that created Blogger. Pyra was acquired by Google in 2003. I also co-founded Kinja, an early news aggregation site. I was the founding advisor to Serious Eats, 2010 recipient of the James Beard Foundation’s Best Food Blog award. I wrote a book about blogging, and used to speak frequently at technology conferences.
Since 2014 I’ve served on the Board of Trustees for the Mad River Glen Cooperative ski area and just completed two terms as its president and served as Interim General Manager during the 2016-17 ski season. I’m currently serving as treasurer. I have some new business ideas bubbling, but mostly my days are spent with my unschooling children.
I’m new, what’s going on here?
You may recall blogs from the nineties and early aughts, when they were just a collection of a person’s thoughts and links to stuff, before blogs became topical, riddled with ads, and then obsolete. This site has been online since May, 1999 with updates of varying frequency. And I’m bringing it back.
Why on earth would you do that?! What about all the haters, trolls, and bots online these days?
Good question. I don’t know, naivete? I miss having my own space to write and share my thoughts. I don’t want to write on Facebook. Instagram and Twitter are too limited in their format. I used to really like blogging and I want to give it a go again.
Yeah, why’d you just totally stop updating your site for like, a decade?
Partially because I didn’t like the blogging system I was using. And then I had two kids, and I didn’t want to write about them, and since I was staying home with them, it didn’t leave much time for writing.
So what are you going to write about?
No guarantees but off the top of my head: books I like, food I’ve eaten, photos and places I’ve been, things I think you should know, thoughts I have had, you know, generic solipsistic blog stuff.
What’s the best thing that happened to you since 2013 (your last updates) that readers would want to know about?
I moved out of New York City! Until I was really gone, I didn’t realize how fully miserable I’d been living in NY. I suspected it, I mean, I knew, but not the depths of it. I’m just not a city person, but it took me a long time to recognize that fact and do something about it.
Also a little shout-out to my kids, who in the past five years have transformed from little dependents to quite self-sufficient young people who simultaneously bring me pure joy and deep deep frustration.
Also we got a dog. I’m not a dog person but I’m trying. Sometimes I post photos of him on Instagram.