The time where I apologize for not releasing things.

You know, another one of those blog posts where I talk about what I plan to do next week and promise this time it'll happen.

Nah.

Today I'll just show you the shape of things before I burn my brain out on them.

How it Started

I pulled on a thread during my website rebuild.

For a long time I had comments enabled through Utterances, a GitHub-powered comment system attached to my posts.

Now, it's no secret I don't get massive traffic, but not even a single spam comment? Not one bot trying to sell me SEO services or questionable pharmaceuticals?

Not that I wanted those comments.

But it made me stop and ask: was requiring a GitHub account preventing any interaction at all?

Then I started asking a different question:

Do I even want comments?

Sure, I ask a lot of open-ended questions, and most of my writing is addressed to an audience.

It's also not that I don't care what people think about the things I write or build. Quite the opposite.

The problem is that I tend to create something, release it, and immediately move on to the next thing.

A comment on a post from six months ago might spark a conversation about a topic or project I've already mentally filed away and built upon three times since.

Not that anything on this site is disposable.

Everything here is iterative.

Everything here becomes part of whatever comes next.

So how would I want people to interact without building an entire platform and moderation system?

The old internet part of my brain immediately answered:

Guest books.

Guest books everywhere.

Before social media profiles, before comment sections, before algorithms, websites had guest books.

If you've never seen one, imagine the guest registry at a wedding.

You weren't there to debate the contents of the site. You were just leaving a note that said:

"Hey, I was here."

Maybe you'd leave a short message.

Maybe you'd say what you liked.

Maybe you'd just sign your name.

And because I'm apparently incapable of leaving old ideas alone, I decided I should build one.

Yes.

This entire chain of events started because I wanted to recreate guest books from the GeoCities and Angelfire era of the internet.

But That Wasn't Enough

As is usually the case, once I pulled on that thread, another idea appeared.

What if it wasn't just one guest book?

What if I could host them?

What if they didn't need to live on a website at all?

What if you could put one on a sticker?

And if I could do that, what other behaviors could I build using the same framework?

That's usually how these experiments start.

Not with a grand vision.

Just a tiny question that refuses to leave me alone.

More To Come

I can't wait to release this experiment into the wild.

Without giving too much away, this one has been an excuse to build something I've wanted to play with for a long time: an automated ecommerce and fulfillment pipeline.

At this point I'm deep into what I'd call the final polish pass for V1.

Which is both exciting and dangerous because "one last improvement" is how projects mysteriously gain another three months of development time.

After That

AI Ant Farm is still scheduled for its V1 facelift, and I've got a few new ideas I want to explore there too.

And honestly?

I should probably get out of the house and go touch grass.