I prefer a garden over polishing every thought into a finished essay - messy, linked, and alive beats a portfolio of sealed posts.
Finished essays age fast. Garden notes can sit half-right, get linked, get updated. Readers see the thinking, not just the conclusion. That’s closer to how ideas actually grow. See Drafting in Public and Digital Garden.
Every time I tell someone I run my own website, they ask why I don't just post on Facebook. After years of watching platforms die and rules change, here's why I keep my own corner of the internet.
I lost my old PHP hosting (and a chunk of my work with it). A weekend of fumbling later, I landed on Hugo + GitHub + Cloudflare Pages - free, faster, and honestly better than what I was paying for.
After losing half a Saturday to theme-shopping, I picked HugoPlate - and a year and change later, I'm still on it. Here's what comes in the box, what I changed, and where it still bites.
Most people right-click every link to open it in a new tab. There's a faster button right under their finger - same gesture on Windows, Mac, and Linux - and almost nobody uses it.
I figured RSS quietly died around 2010. A friend pointed out it never actually did - it just stopped being trendy. Two weeks of using it later, I was a convert.
Every couple of years, someone tells me they're going mobile-only. A few months later, they're sheepishly asking to borrow my laptop for taxes, video edits, or a PDF form. Here's why I keep mine around.
I almost deleted Facebook a couple of years ago. Then I stumbled onto a built-in feature most people don't know exists - and it's the only reason I still open the app.
Month one with AI on WordPress builds I was thrilled. Month three I finally got consistent output - helpers, reference examples, and a short rules doc that stop every feature from drifting.
Leading worship with just an acoustic guitar always felt thin in a big room - until someone slid a pad track underneath me during practice. The whole night changed.