I built a website.

If you know me at all, you'll be thinking, "But Andrew, you've built a hundred websites before." And you'd be right. But this one is different.

This time, I built the entire system from the ground up. It's what's called a "flat-file" content management system (CMS).  Flat-file means that it doesn't require a database like most websites, and the CMS just means it's easy for me to log in to an admin section and create a new post, upload images, back up the site, and so on.

I've been working on this project for the better part of a year, on and off. I call it "JaspyCMS" after Jasper, the first cat that my wife and I had when we were a young married couple. What you're seeing, and what I'm using, is the tenth iteration of the project. I'm so bad at coding that, even with the help of ChatGPT, I had to start from scratch ten times to get it right.

Persistence, people!

Here's why I built it.

There are two reason, actually. First, I've always wanted to build my own 'system'. I've been a WordPress guy for a long time. I've made a lot of money building sites on WordPress for people too. But I've always wanted my own thing. And now I've done it.

The other reason is that I want to blog. Because in my heart it's still the 1990's and people care about me having a blog? No. It's really just for me. I've started this daily practice in which I read a little bit from seven different books each morning and do some other stuff too.  It's a good practice, and I'll write a full blog about it another time.

As a result of this practice that I've taken up - you could also just call them 'habits' - I have ideas. A swirling mass of ideas that sometimes congeal into something interesting. And so I want to write them down. Writing is a great way to refine ideas. Even if the ideas aren't that good, writing them down will give me something to come back to later, to remember what I was thinking and build upon it.

So that's my plan. I did build a rudimentary comment system into this CMS and if you happen to visit, and if you find it interesting enough to come back, maybe you'll see something interesting and we can have a conversation about it in the comments. For now, the comments are pretty wide open and I'll keep them open on new posts for about a week. We'll see what happens.

Thanks for checking this out. I hope you have a great day.

God Bless you!

-Andrew