Creating and maintaining a decent website can be a ton of work. Most of my professional experience before Envisioning was around web development, given how I taught myself HTML and CSS a in my teens, and knew enough about design and code to manage some pretty complex installations.
My own web presence online has been pretty scattered over the years. I started blogging before it was cool and never really considered writing for any particular audience. Writing - online and off - has always been about sensemaking for myself first and foremost.
In terms of content management systems and blogging tools, I have tried just about everything out there over the years, and frankly never found anything that 100% satisfied my needs for something fast, sufficiently light-weight and extensible. That is, until I figured out how "easy" it has now become to code your own solution by wrangling code from ChatGPT and Github Copilot.
With this in mind, I replicated the NextJS framework created by Lee Rob for his personal website and started making my own adjustments. I deleted the functions I did not need, and built a couple of features that you are seeing live on this page.
Most of the effort went into finding and organizing the blog posts you find here today. Much of my writing was spread out across the web, from Medium to LinkedIn to Envisioning and a handful of other places. Others were exported from previous blogging tools like my Squarespace website, or even from my personal journal (Day One). I spent probably 10 days collecting and publishing the ~90 pieces that are live as of publishing.
I don't expect to spend much time managing the backend code moving forward. Short of a few features, I consider the website pretty much done. Blog posts will obviously keep coming, including a dozen or so "historical" posts I am still looking to retroactively publish, but in terms of features I feel I'm 99% done.
At any rate - thanks for reading me!
I often feel like I have nothing important to say - or that my ideas are not cohesive enough - but something about having spent the last few days organizing my personal history has been quite a revelation.
There is something powerful about stepping back and observing your opus. Up close the details seem all wrong and pointless, but when seeing the big picture, from the perspective of decades, everything suddenly makes sense.
