This is the fourth version of this site. The first had a blog engine, a comment system and a tag cloud. The second had a headless CMS and a build pipeline that took nine minutes. The third had an animation on every section and a theme switcher nobody used, including me.
This one is a folder of files, some type, and one green line that fills in when you point at a row.
Each rewrite removed a job
Every version failed the same way: I stopped writing, because publishing had become a small piece of engineering work. The tag cloud needed tags. The CMS needed a session. The animations needed checking on four screen sizes before I could post two hundred words about a bug.
- Version one taught me that features on a personal site are chores in disguise.
- Version two taught me that a build step is a thing that can break on a Sunday.
- Version three taught me that a design I have to maintain is a design I will stop updating.
What survived all four
Three things, which is a useful list because it took four attempts to find them.
The list of things I made. It is the only part anyone has ever mentioned to me. It has been on every version, in almost exactly the same shape.
Dates. Without them, old writing quietly pretends to be current. With them, a post from 2023 is allowed to be wrong.
A way to reach me that is not a form. An address in the footer has produced more real conversations than every contact form I have built for anyone.
The test for version five
There will not be a version five if I can help it, but the test is written down anyway: can I publish a post from a train, on a phone, in under five minutes, without a build finishing? Right now the answer is yes, and I think that is the whole design brief.