I track my reading on BookWyrm and always wished it looked a little more playful. So I built a cozy living room for my shelves, with Toronto's weather in the window, decorations for the season, a sleepy cat and the occasional visitor.
Most LinkedIn photos carry no information and the AI generated memes wore me out, so I built a browser extension that hides post images and videos. What is left is a boring feed where the real updates show up in seconds.
Dave Winer asked for a web of Markdown, Andrew Shell built a browser for it, and my engine now publishes an llms.txt and a Markdown twin of every page.
The engine grew a podcast feed, a player and a migration path, because I had four shows sitting on a WordPress install I no longer wanted to maintain.
I taught the engine to blend Mastodon and Bluesky replies into one comment thread, and picked up local search, lighter images, and dark mode on the way.
I rebuilt my blog engine to make sure that everything you see here is transparent, private, and free from third-party tracking.
A look at why I built a minimalist local-first static site generator powered by simple Python scripts, AI, and Markdown.