Dan marked-up his first website at Geocities in the mid-1990s, started blogging in 2003, and established his Conover on Media blog in 2004. In 2005 he launched the personal group blog Xark! and Spoletoblog, an arts-festival site that introduced blogging at The (Charleston, SC) Post and Courier. He built The Post and Courier’s staff-blogging platform in 2006, and was named the newspaper’s interim web director later that year.
After leaving the paper in 2008, Dan added website design to his freelance portfolio. His essays on media futurism at the Xark blog led to various conference invitations as a panelist, moderator and speaker, and paying gigs leading workshops for the American Press Institute and Johns Hopkins University. He took a full-time job with a Chicago-based tech consultancy in 2009. In 2010, he and his wife, Janet Edens, founded Xarktopia LLC, a media-services company.
As the newspaper industry finally retreated behind its current digital paywalls in 2012-13, Dan hung up his media-futurist hat and got on with the rest of his life.