Rebuilding a Home for My Work

A Website Is More Than a Collection of Pages

For a long time, I thought of my website as a place where I published things. That was true, but it was not the whole truth.

The site had also become a record of my life: what I had believed, where I had traveled, what I had learned, the work I had tried, and the questions I was still carrying. Some of the writing was polished. Some of it was dated. Some of it was unfinished. All of it held a little history.

Over the years, that history had spread across different versions of the site and different ways of publishing. The website still worked, but it had begun to feel less like a home and more like a series of rooms added at different times.

So I rebuilt it.

Not because the old work no longer mattered. Because it did.

Rebuilding the House Without Throwing Away the Library

Starting a website from an empty folder is appealing. There are no old decisions to explain, no forgotten links to preserve, and no awkward pieces left over from an earlier version of yourself.

That is not what happens when you have been publishing for years.

An established website carries invisible commitments. Old links live in bookmarks, search results, emails, and other people’s writing. Posts have addresses. Pages have relationships to one another. Drafts contain ideas that may not be ready yet but are still worth keeping.

The archive also has a texture. It shows how a person’s interests have developed and how their attention has moved over time. If you flatten all of that into a clean new system, you may get a tidier website while losing the thing that made it worth visiting.

The first requirement, then, was not a fresh start. It was continuity.

I wanted to improve the structure around the writing without pretending the past could—or should—be separated from the present.

What Changed Behind the Scenes

The technical part of the rebuild was a move from Jekyll to Astro, using the Stardrive foundation as a starting point. Those names matter to me because they describe the tools I work with, but they are not the reason I rebuilt the site.

The reason was simpler: I wanted a publishing system that was easier to maintain and a website that could give the writing more room.

The new foundation gives the site clearer ways to organize essays, pages, archives, feeds, search, sharing, and the newsletter. It also makes it easier to see which things are public, which are unfinished, and which should remain private.

That work is mostly invisible to a reader. That is a good thing.

The best publishing system should remove friction between a reader and the thought being shared. It should help someone find an older essay, follow a thread, return to something later, or discover a piece they might otherwise have missed.

Technology is useful when it supports attention rather than demanding it.

Preserving the Past Without Being Trapped by It

One of the most important decisions was to preserve the existing writing and its addresses wherever possible.

That sounds simple until a website has accumulated years of formatting habits, links, special cases, and small agreements you once made with yourself and then forgot about.

Rebuilding brought all of those decisions back into view.

Some old material needed to be cleaned up. Some links needed to be checked. Some pages belonged in the public archive, while some ideas were better left as drafts. The work was not glamorous, but it was more important than adding another visual effect.

Preservation does not mean refusing to change. It means changing the machinery while respecting the meaning carried by the things inside it.

An archive does not have to remain frozen. It simply should not be accidentally damaged in the name of improvement.

The Questions Beneath the Rebuild

The process made me think about the relationship between technical work and creative work.

Choosing how to organize a body of writing is not only a technical decision. It is also a decision about how that work will be understood. What belongs together? What deserves to be easy to find? What is finished? What is still becoming?

An old website can collect layers of accidental complexity. A feature was added for one reason, a workaround stayed long after the original problem disappeared, and an old convention became part of the system simply because nobody wanted to disturb it.

Rebuilding creates a chance to ask better questions:

• What is this site actually for?
• Which parts help readers?
• Which parts only reflect the limitations of an older setup?
• What should remain private?
• What needs to be easier for me to maintain?

Those questions apply to more than websites. They apply to almost any creative practice that has been around long enough to accumulate history.

Progress Is Not the Same as Starting Over

There is a temptation to treat every website rebuild as a grand announcement: new design, new technology, new beginning.

But this was not really a new beginning. It was maintenance in the deeper sense of the word—taking responsibility for something that already mattered and giving it a more durable structure.

The site is still a work in progress. There are old links to review, pages to inspect, and details to verify as the public version continues to take shape. The archive will keep changing because I will keep changing.

That feels appropriate.

I do not want a website that pretends to be finished. I want a place that makes it possible to keep writing, keep revising, and keep finding the useful pieces of the past.

The tools helped me rebuild the house. The more important part was remembering what the house was meant to hold.