I keep my life in a pile of plain-text notes — projects, media, things worth remembering, the running record of how the house actually works. Hundreds of files. The capture side is great: plain text is the cheapest possible way to write something down, and it’ll still open in fifty years. The reading side was the problem. The default reading view is fine the way a spreadsheet is fine. It gets the job done and inspires nothing.
A website from the pile
So I built a machine that reads the whole pile and turns it into an actual website. Every note becomes a page. It’s got real typography, real search across every word, and links between notes that light up the way they should. It rebuilds itself automatically: I write a note, and within a few minutes it’s live on the site with zero button-pressing from me. The important constraint was that I didn’t have to change one thing about how I write. Plain text stays the daily format. The machine does the visual lifting on top of it.
Private on purpose
It lives entirely inside my own network — only reachable by me and the people I let onto it, no public front door. That’s on purpose. It’s my second brain; it doesn’t need to be on the open internet to be useful, and plenty of what’s in there is nobody’s business but mine.
The touch I like best: any single note can opt out of the standard look and be its own hand-designed page instead, while still living in the same pile. So a throwaway grocery list and a fully art-directed project write-up coexist in the same system, and the machine is smart enough to leave the fancy ones alone.
The redesign I threw away
The part I almost left out is the redesign I threw away. The first version had a look I liked — blocky, a bit beachy, the palette of somewhere warm. Same day I shipped it, I got an itch to redo the whole aesthetic: different fonts, a completely different grid, a bunch of clever interactive bits. I built the entire thing, looked at it, and… rolled it back within the hour. It was different, not better. It was change dressed up as progress. The original look went right back in, and the fancy version doesn’t exist on any branch anymore — I let it go.
That’s the recurring tax on projects like this: the hardest editorial call isn’t what to add, it’s noticing when you’re about to spend a whole evening making something worse and cheerfully talking yourself out of it. Most days I lose that fight. That day I won it, and the site’s been the same friendly pile-with-a-face ever since.