Hello, world — setting up this log
This is a log of things I build — electronics, 3D printing, and whatever else ends up on the workbench. Projects tend to generate a lot of photos and half-remembered lessons; this is where those go so future-me can find them.
How this site works
The whole site is plain static HTML — no framework, no build step. Every post is a single file, committed to git and served as-is from GitHub Pages. A tiny prefetch script warms up pages when you hover over a link, which is the entire performance strategy. There's an RSS feed, maintained by hand, like nature intended.
What posts look like
Each entry gets a reference designator (this one is PRJ-001), a date, and a status. Figures number themselves:
Parts lists render as datasheet-style tables:
| Part | Qty | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| HTML file | 1 | per post, written by hand |
| CSS file | 1 | shared, graph paper included |
| JavaScript | 24 lines | hover prefetch only |
And code blocks look like this:
$ git add posts/2026-06-12-hello-world.html
$ git commit -m "PRJ-001: hello world"
$ git push # that's the whole deploy pipelineHow posts get written
A confession: I don't write the HTML by hand, and most of these posts start as a handful of bullet points and a phone full of blurry workbench photos. The actual writing is a collaboration with Claude.
It works less like dictation and more like an interview. I hand over the outline and the photos; it reads back through the relevant project and the previous entries, and then it asks me the questions the outline skipped — what the part number actually was, which thing I tried before the one that worked, what each photo is showing, what broke. The good content usually lives in those answers, not in the bullet points.
The one firm rule is that it doesn't get to make anything up. Every measurement, part number, and "and then it caught fire" in a post came from me — if a detail is still unknown after the questions, it stays out rather than getting plausibly invented. Then it drafts in my voice, I read it, and nothing ships until I've said so. Think of it as a very patient editor who has also read every previous entry, which is more than I can say for myself.
What's next
Actual projects. There's a backlog of printer mods and a few PCBs in various states of disassembly that deserve proper write-ups.