I have a website now.

This should not feel as significant as it does.

People have had websites for several decades. The technology is not revolutionary. I did not invent HTML this afternoon.

Still, most of what I’ve made or written over the years lives somewhere I don’t really control.

GitHub repositories. X threads. Chats. Documents. Folders whose names became meaningless three laptops ago.

A lot of it technically exists.

Very little of it feels like it has a place.

That’s what I’m trying to change.

I almost started with a social network

The funny part is that I got here by thinking about something much larger.

I was talking about how difficult I find some of the social machinery around making things: promoting work, meeting compatible people, finding collaborators, asking for help, actually being visible.

At some point the thought became: I wish there were a social platform for people a bit like me.

People who make things. People who think a lot. People who do not necessarily fit conventional professional environments very naturally. People who would rather find a few compatible humans than perform for an audience.

We started designing it.

Circles. Threads. Ask / Offer. Ways for quieter people to be heard. Ways to find the mythical PR buddy whose strengths point in the opposite direction from mine.

It was becoming a real product idea surprisingly quickly.

Naturally, my first instinct was to build the platform.

This is exactly how I end up with enormous projects.

So I am doing the opposite.

One person first.

Me.

Before I build a digital home for anybody else, I’m going to see whether I can make one that I actually use.

The corkboard

The design started from a corkboard metaphor.

Notes. Projects. Questions. Things currently worth keeping in sight.

The first danger was obvious: make it too literal and the website becomes a detective game. Fake thumbtacks, rotated paper, coffee stains, probably some red string if nobody intervenes.

The useful idea is simpler.

Discovery can feel like a board. Reading should feel like reading. Projects can accumulate material. Current things can stay pinned. Old things can move elsewhere without disappearing.

I want the metaphor to organize the site, not cosplay as office stationery.

Right now

The site is still mostly empty.

I like that.

There is room on the wall.

The next part is harder than building it: actually putting things here before I have polished them into evidence that I already knew what I was doing.

Let’s see what gets pinned.