About Us

HawaiiStories is two things. Well, many things. Well...

Essentially, HawaiiStories is a a storytelling community, a gathering place where web-savvy islanders and islanders-at-heart share their thoughts — be they random epiphanies, poignant observations, anecdotes, rants, questions, lyrics, poems, or anything else, really. Hawai`i is what ties the people together, but the things they share cross the whole spectrum of everyday life.

HawaiiStories may be irreverent and silly one moment, heavy and introspective the next, and then simply casual, conversational, and fun.

Geeks would call it a "community weblog" or 'blog, but not in the traditional link-collecting, web-spelunking sense of Metafilter. Rather, something more in the spirit of The City Stories Project, which (along with the now-defunct Surreilly.com) partially served as the inspiration for HawaiiStories.

The genesis for HawaiiStories came from online diarists, journalers, and "personal webloggers" — people with a love of writing, storytelling, and exhibitionism. But in practice, the HawaiiStories community is much broader, and is fortunately much more informal and casual.

We hope the HawaiiStories community weblog will inspire island webheads to share their stories, and respond and react to the tales and thoughts of others, fostering a fun and intelligent (well, mostly intelligent) exchange of both random ideas and provocative points of view.

But.

HawaiiStories is also a home for wayward writers. We know many journalers on the web lack the money, time, or geekly skill to set up their own site, and are thus limited to free, but frequently cheesy, unreliable, and advertising-smothered services like Diaryland or Geocities. And we know — because we've talked to them — that there are countless more would-be escribitionists who aren't online because they just don't want to deal with the nuts-and-bolts of the web at all.

It is for these people that HawaiiStories was created in the first place. We wanted to provide a venue, an outlet, for these voices that would otherwise be lost.

Therefore, HawaiiStories proudly provides hosting for anyone whose ties to Hawaii, and whose desire (and ability) to write, is strong. "Tenants" would be set up with their very own journal/weblog site, managed via the WordPress content management system. With it, posting stories to the web is push-button easy — log in, fill out a form, and click 'publish.' And yet, for the more ambitious scribe, the setup is powerful, versatile, and customizable.

HawaiiStories is everything its members want it to be. We invite you to join them.