Building an Internet Home

For all my time spent making things on the internet, I never had a place that I felt fully expressed in. I write online at CodedShapes. I have a consultancy-facing website at CodedConstructs and I post regularly on LinkedIn, but all of them had been, for lack of a better word, part of my “work” life.

That’s still a part of me, but none of them had room for my notes on writing, or recipes I made, or the type of coffee I enjoy.

And I don’t want them to. It would be too jarring and selfish of me to publish a food recipe on a newsletter about technical computational design.

So how then do I put all the facets of my life into a single place without it being so confusing?

A brief recount of my site

I have done many iterations of my personal website now.

It started as a simple blog with WordPress, where I was just experimenting with writing online.

Then, when I first learned about digital gardens, I wanted to make one of my own. And for a time I had one, but maintaining it long term didn’t make sense to me. While others took notes to write more “personal” essays, I took notes for pragmatism. I took them in meetings, for software, and to use them.

Then I abandoned the attempt altogether because it just got too hard to think about.

What revived it

Honestly? It’s AI.

Because even though I know how to code (very well I might humbly add), AI takes away a lot of the implementation effort. Not only that, it’s an excellent partner that helped me think through the design and organisation of the site.

I can argue with it and test theories on how to best express myself on a personal site. It renewed my motivation to once more try and build a place on the internet.

A home with rooms

In mentally sparring with LLMs, what I came to realize is that my interests, or rather what I want to share with people online, can be separated into groups. My problem with a digital garden was that it was too messy. Things were hard to find and all the “notes” were treated as equal. That may be fine if you only want notes for writing, but I wanted to put in recipes, photographs from trips, coffee. Not all of that belongs to a “garden”.

Which is where the concept of “a house with rooms” came about. It’s really just an extension of a digital garden, only more organized.

Here, instead of treating everything as the same, things are separated by their “themes”. There’s cohesion to the way they’re laid out. A recipe is not the same as a note, but a note can link to a recipe if there’s something worth talking about.

A house tour

There are currently 12 rooms. There were 9 when I started writing this, then I added 3 more.

It’s a lot to go through, so let me give you a quick tour.

Thinking Rooms: Garden, Essays, Journal

These are the rooms where I “do” my thinking. My notes, the opinionated essays that come out of those notes, and my journals, which are personal stories about me just living.

Making Rooms: Kitchen, Workshop, Gallery

These are the things I “create”. It isn’t about writing anymore, it’s about actually doing things and bringing them to life outside of words.

The kitchen is me adapting the recipes I have found to my lifestyle and my palate.

The workshop is for my projects, both personal and professional. Like this website, or the consultancy I am running, or even just me trying to organize my cupboard at home.

The gallery is for the pictures I take. Instagram makes me lose sight of the purpose of pictures, which to me is to document and capture memories. Here, I can look back based on the places and events I have been to. I do exclude images with faces in them though because (a) privacy and (b) it’s about the environment.

Collecting Rooms: Lounge, Library, Beans, Tea

These are where I “keep” things. The games I’ve played, the shows I’ve watched, the coffee and tea I’ve brewed. I don’t keep track of everything, that would be insane, only the ones I think are worth remembering.

Recommending Rooms: Clippings, Finds

Then, because I am always buying or using new stuff and recommending things to people, I wanted a place to store all of that.

Clippings is my room for the stuff I’ve read or listened to online. Articles, tweets, podcast episodes, things I have found interesting.

Finds is my room for things I would recommend to people. Like the best sleep mask, or the task app I currently use.

I wonder if there’s room here for food and cafes too, might only be useful for the places I’ve been but maybe…

More about me: Log, About

Then finally we have the “rooms”, or rather just places, that are more about me as a person than what I do. My stories, my experiences, and what I am up to.

The log is random and sporadic personal updates, and about is self-explanatory.

House rules

Each room has a theme that binds it, but they also have a purpose. Most of them are to remind me of my own work, and are expressions of the different facets of me.

It’s a blend of documenting, curating and creating all at the same time. For the documenting part, the rule I use is that if it isn’t used or useful, it doesn’t go in.

So all the games and books and coffee aren’t an exhaustive list of things I have tried, only the ones that have impacted me. It’s the same with the creating side. I am not making things just to fill the rooms, I only want the space there for when I do.

The technical bits

Alright, if you’re interested in the more technical stuff, this is kinda how the site works.

Built with

Astro, no framework and no component library. But I did have my own colour system, so that made it easier.

Type

Literata for reading, Plus Jakarta Sans for titles and labels.

Photographs

Taken on trips with my camera(s)

Hosting

The site runs from GitHub into Netlify and images are hosted on Bunny.net

Workflow

This site is updated from my personal Obsidian system through a pretty comprehensive set of rules and mapping that I had to work out with Claude

Of course, this idea is not one that I came up with alone, these are the sites that I have referenced and gave me inspiration to build my own

• Maggie Appleton
• Chester
• Becky Isjwara