On Building a Small, Human Website

Welcome to my first weekly note! I've made this easy to skim so you can skip what doesn't interest you.

Studio Notes

all things crochet

This week I got this website up and running. Ghost is much easier than WordPress to just start getting blogs out there. Which is what I wanted. This blog is mostly for me at this point. I want to document my progress as an aspiring crochet designer, so having a place to do that is a natural first step. Also, I want to start collecting emails as soon as possible since I don't jive with most social media platforms.

I've been researching how to take better pictures of my work. The photos I have for my first pattern are abysmal. So, despite the written pattern being ready for testing(!), it's still not ready.

I also worked on a bobble bird bundle. I'm excited to share!

Nature

sightings and experiences

• saw a Nuthatch and some Carolina Wrens at my mother-in-law's house. They were so beautiful! It's nice to see birds still flitting around even as winter arrives.
• Lots of deer - we live out in the middle of corn fields. I'll only share really unique deer sightings from this point forward because they are everywhere!

Gathered Things

annotated links and more discovered this week

8 principles for digital-world building by kening zhu - It's empowering to find people who are doing what you would like to do in the future. I want to write more about my vision for this site in the future, but for now, this article and Zhu's website serve as a good launching pad for my own thoughts. I love the ideas of digital gardening, thinking in public, and bringing a fuller version of myself forward, rather than just treating visitors here as capitalistic consumers and putting myself in the box of a content marketer. Zhu is much more articulate in expressing these aspirations. Here are a few quotes I found particularly on point.

a [digital] world is — first and foremost — something you build because it feeds your soul. it’s connected to your sense of purpose, and thus, it can’t come from a place of lack, desperation, or need for validation. the process of building it must feel nourishing and fun — rather than like a chore.

This combination of "feeding the soul" and "fun" is something I want to aim for.

a digital world is a mirror of a living network of ideas, thoughts, and creative expressions in your mind — distilled, refined, and externalized in the digital world. it’s a digital garden, an ecosystem, because the things you share are alive and in conversation with each other. things are in flux, evolving with you, ever-changing.

It feels wrong to me to separate my thought world from my business. Whether this is right or wrong from a business perspective matters less to me than sharing "aliveness" whether that is through nature, my own creativity, or through personal reflections.

the purpose of a digital world is to show this process of life, rather than to simply act as a simple showroom/gallery portfolio, or a 5 page digital marketing brochure. therefore, the core premise of a digital world is that it always values process over product; the journey over the end result.

I want to create what I am drawn to: real people, making real art, sharing real life. The floor of my business is making a little money, so I can stay at home with my girls. The ceiling is doing it in my way, by my values. I'm aiming high.

Grow slowly, stay small by Herman of Bear Blog - Here's another example of a similarly run business. I thought about using Bear Blog, as it looks cool and simple. If I weren't trying to combine a business and personal site, this may have been where I landed. Check out this short article for the parable that Herman shares. It is a powerful reframe. Herman's vision for his business is what I envision as well...

The most important factor, however, is that I don't need it to be something grander. It affords me a life that I love, and provides me with a craft to practise.

The Great Offline by Lauren Colle - As someone who has been rather critical of "the internet" at times, it has been lovely to find people maintaining personal blogs that are reflective, deep, and challenging, whether or not I agree with what is said. Colle writes compellingly about how we often simplify and glorify our experiences in the offline world. I know I can be rather skeptical about life on the internet, leaning hard into my own embodied existence while at the same time feeling this odd pull to write online. I found Colle's writing confrontational in all the right ways.

As concepts, “wilderness” and “the offline” are deeply enmeshed. Both offer mythologies of ahistoricity and unaccountability, an escape clause from the dilemmas of a globalized world. They cloak themselves in the language of embodiment (the wind in your hair, the sand under your feet), while offering up the fantasy of moving through the world without a digital or ecological footprint, as a little wisp of pure soul. Together — in setting up a binaristic opposition between the corrupted, connected, digital self on the one hand, and the pure, wild, disconnected self on the other — they pose major obstacles to thinking through the complexity of human-technological-ecological relations.

I'm not surprised that we use language to protect our sense of rightness. But it's hard to confront your own.

The absence of analysis about what exactly we are doing online or offline — as well as the ways that screens and “real life” blur together — lend this discussion an almost magical quality: It is as if the mere presence of a screen becomes a kind of radiation, triggering irreparable mutations that lessen our humanity.

The idea that screens are demolishing our common, embodied life is widespread. While I still want to live an embodied, present life, I don't want to fall into the fallacy of "digital dualism" that this article explores.

I've seen people live "the good life" on the internet. And I've seen people be consumed by greed and selfishness in the real world. People are people (for good or for ill), whether they stare at their phone all day or spend all day in nature.

What's the theme running through these notes? In the modern world, where entrepreneurs are told to pursue bigger, faster, better, I want to find peace and life in small things, nature, and "a craft to practise." Real life is in the small things, whether digital or not. Leave me a comment. I'd love to hear what you think! Will this work? I don't know, but I don't think I'm the first person to have tried something like this, and I won't be the last, because at the end of the day, people don't want to hear from AI. They want to hear from each other. And I want to be a part of that world.