Second portrait. This one is about the tool you’re reading this on.
Where it came from
I have never published anything. I’ve had LinkedIn for years and I’m embarrassed to write there.
In July I decided the way out wasn’t to start posting loose notes. It was to write the book I’ve been carrying for twenty years.
That’s where this came from on 14 July: a memoir in chapters, in Spanish, with a translation.
And one rule that has saved me a lot of wasted time. Work first, text after.
I don’t do anything in order to have material. If a month was only routine, there’s no chapter that month, and nothing happens.
What’s there today
The site went live on 29 July, and on 19 August I bought it a name of its own.
There are three things inside, and each tells something different.
The log is the book: five chapters written, three of them already out.
The whole index has been in plain sight since day one, each line with its stamp: what’s delivered can be read, and what’s pending says so.
The workshop is about learning to make video, with the numbers and what each attempt cost me: fifteen entries, seven published.
And the factory, which started yesterday, is about the tools. This is the second one.
How it works inside
There’s no blog engine and no bought template. There’s a program of mine, build.mjs, that reads
the folders I write in and turns out the finished pages.
What goes up to the server is still pages, with nothing running behind them.
That’s why the site has no analytics, no cookies and no fonts pulled from elsewhere: nobody knows who comes in, not even me.
The look isn’t blog-like on purpose either. It’s copied from a shift handover log: ruled paper, one single colour, paragraphs numbered so they can be quoted.
There’s a private area at an address that isn’t linked anywhere, and that’s where I read what hasn’t come out yet, on the phone and in the real typeface.
Every draft carries a publish button, but the button doesn’t publish from here: it takes me to the Deck, which is where anything with consequences lives. The rule is that the blog runs nothing.
Before I read a piece it goes past two gatekeepers. One is the voice gatekeeper, and it measures whether it sounds like me, against what I write when I write to people.
The other is the truth gatekeeper, and it checks that hard facts carry a source, and that the source opens.
What it cost
The expensive part wasn’t building it, it was tuning the voice. I threw out the whole first profile text: it sounded like a brochure from someone selling artificial intelligence.
That taught me something I wasn’t expecting. Writing to people I make sentences of sixteen words, and when I give instructions to a machine I go to double that.
The text that sounds like me is the short one, and now that gets measured before it’s shown to me.
The other bill was a silly one, which is why I’m writing it down. The site could be open or closed to the public, and that state wasn’t saved anywhere.
So any deploy done without remembering the flag closed the whole blog again, quietly. Worse: every time I pressed “publish” on a draft, the book lost its indexing.
It was fixed yesterday: the state is kept in a file, site/.modo, and publishing one piece can no
longer change it.
Where I decide, and what’s still open
Everything that’s seen is decided here, and that I’m not delegating.
Nobody publishes for me. Chapters reach me written, with the questions at the foot, and I cross out, correct and decide what goes out.
What’s still open is LinkedIn, which is exactly where all of this started. August is about to end and I haven’t published a single article.
The book is out there with three chapters now, so my stage fright is running out of excuses.
