About This Site...

This site is both part of my personal web site, but also a sandbox to work through the type of blog/content management system that I kinda wish the web had evolved towards. It is based on some opinions I've developed over a few decades of content-focused tech work:

1. Content should be authored separately from how it is viewed. Writing and reading are two different things, so trying to merge them both into one app serves neither audience optimally. The separation allows each audience to be treated as a first-class citizen in their own space, while also minimizing the potential for security problems because you do not have to have your authoring tools on the public internet, like, at all.
2. The focus of the web should be on what is said, not how it looks. I do believe that the looks of an app and its UX matters... but it should "just work", not be the primary focus. I feel that the early trends of web sites competing with each other for the best design work drove the web in the wrong direction. I'd be in more in favor of every site looking and working the same, so we can focus on content and functionality.
3. Bright colors hurt some people's eyes. Dark colors are hard for other people. We should not pick one of those extremes at all. This site sits in the middle, so should be friendly to all eyes.
4. Audiences do not want to click through pages after pages of your content. The density of content on-screen should be as high as possible while still respecting readbility contraints such as font size, white space, etc.
5. Information Architecture should be explicit. Create categorized content, with UI widgets to navigate. Not hashtags. Content should be visible by design, not discoverable by action. (Nothing wrong with discoverabiliy, of course... but that should be secondary to an explicit navigation UX).
6. No ads. They suck. If you need to monetize your site, do it with affiliate links that are relevant to the content - that way you are not pushing anything on your audience, but you get a little something back in exchange for guiding them towards something they were looking at anyway.

What that all boils down to is this site.

This is the first / worst iteration of it, and all anyone is seeing is the resulting words. There is a whole authoring environment that only runs on my PC to create those words and these pages.

At this point, having written this, it is good enough to be my personal blog. I am intending to work a but more on it to see if I can make the underlying app workable enough to publish. In the meantime, I have imported a few old blog posts and social media feeds to get a sense of how it works, and hopefully will remember to write more.

One word on the UI of the topic pages:

The choice to have centered dates and titles, with content split to either side is deliberate. I want the content to feel like a timeline in order to give the audience a sense of forward motion as you read. For blogs, you can see the author's thoughts evolve. For social media, you see things in the order they were presented. I can see this also working for history timelines, or even creative writing to share a story where the timing has focus. This won't work for all content, but I'm not trying to build something for all authors.

It does get a little wonky at times. It doesn't work well if you resize your browser. I'm OK with that. I'm still noodling the final form of all this.

This is not a complex piece of tech:

I have a local app written in Astro JS that I kick off from the command line on my PC. That gives me with a local web site where I can edit all the content. It looks fairly similar to the public site, but with all kinds of editing widgets added.

When I make changes, they are all written to .json files on my system via API calls. I then run the build process that Astro provides, and get a version of everything as static HTML, which I then upload to my repository on github, which publishes them to codingdave.com

That is it - no databases, nothing fancy, just a small pile of vanilla Javascript spaghetti.

In the future, I'm going to split the editing to a separate app, which will let me get rid of some redundant data from the HTML. Until I do so, the page sizes are twice as big as they need to be. Ah, well. We'll fix that in version 2.

5 Weeks ago, I said this was a simple little app. And it was....

But shortly thereafter, I realized that I was building an engine that not only could work for my needs, but could be a broader content authoring solution for a variety of people and organizations.

I've been writing content management apps since the 90s. I've done simple ones and complex ones. I've learned a lot about what works and what does not, and I have some ideas I've never had a chance to build out. I've also been working in tech long enough to know how to build a product, launch, it and maintain it.

While I was initially unsure if I wanted to keep working in tech after my last gig ended, I started thinking about better ways to acquire health care in the USA than taking a job just to get benefits. If I was willing to work some hours for someone else to get benefits, why not put those same hours into building something of my own? I don't even need it to be a huge success - if 4 hours a day of work on a product earns me enough to buy health insurance, I come out ahead of the game because my goal is met but I still have full autonomy over my working schedule and the actual work.

With all that in mind, I've greatly expanded the vision of what I am doing here. It is going to be a SaaS app. And I'm 90% of the way to a working MVP, so could launch it in the next couple weeks. But I'll probably launch closer to mid-late April. Why launch the minimum when a little more work would make it more valuable to my future authors? I've got time.

While I'm not ready to list out the full feature set yet, I will says that I'll be focused on a handful of driving principles as I build the app:

1. Content Ownership & Portability - Empower users with true content ownership and flexibility in how they publish and use their content.
2. Simplified Content Publishing - Remove technical barriers to publishing while maintaining content quality.
3. Distribution Independence - Enable content distribution across multiple channels without platform lock-in. I want people to use my products because they like them, not because I trapped them.
4. Operational Efficiency - Maintain low operational costs while delivering high value.
5. No AI Hype - Use AI only where it provides clear value, not just because it is the latest trend.
6. Market Adaptability - Build generic solutions that can be configured and adapted for specific markets, not locking the product's capabilities to its original use cases.

More to come when I'm closer to launching...