So, I Built a Blog…

There’s a particular kind of lie I seem to tell myself quite regularly:

“This shouldn’t take long.”

It normally happens just before I start changing something on a server.

This time, the innocent idea was to build myself a blog.

Not a business. Not a personal brand. Not the beginning of my inevitable career as an internet influencer.

Just somewhere of my own to write things down.

Naturally, that turned into a project.

Why a blog? And why now?

The internet feels very different from the one I grew up with.

A lot of what we put online now lives inside somebody else’s platform. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and whatever comes next decide how it looks, who sees it and, occasionally, whether it still exists tomorrow.

I use those platforms and I’m not planning some dramatic digital detox.

But I liked the idea of having a little corner of the internet that was actually mine.

Somewhere I could write about the things I’m interested in without worrying whether they fit an algorithm.

Technology will definitely appear here. So will family life, football, photos, random projects and probably the occasional story about something that has gone spectacularly wrong.

In other words: life.

Hence Life in Production.

The name

Anyone who works in IT will understand the slightly dangerous implication of putting something “into production”.

Production is where things are supposed to work.

It is also, traditionally, where you discover all the things that didn’t.

That seemed strangely appropriate for life.

There’s no development environment where you can test being a parent before deploying it. No rollback button when you say something stupid. No snapshot you can restore because Tuesday went badly.

You make decisions, deal with whatever happens next and occasionally wonder why everything was working perfectly yesterday.

Life is permanently in production.

And somewhere underneath all of that is the human layer.

That became the tagline:

Stories from the human layer.

Then I discovered Ghost

I could have signed up for a hosted blogging service, selected a theme and started writing.

That would have been sensible.

Instead, I installed Ghost on my own server.

This is roughly the technological equivalent of deciding you fancy some toast and beginning by building a kitchen.

But I already run quite a lot of things myself, so self-hosting the blog felt right.

It also meant I could make it mine.

And that’s where the trouble started.

“I’ll just change the theme…”

The original plan was simple.

Install Ghost.

Find a decent theme.

Change a few colours.

Done.

Except there was always one more thing.

The header could be better.

The spacing wasn’t quite right.

That font doesn’t work there.

Maybe the homepage needs another section.

What happens in dark mode?

Can that underscore blink like a terminal cursor?

Obviously the underscore should blink like a terminal cursor.

Before long, I wasn’t configuring a blog anymore. I was building one.

And I loved it.

Building Life in Production

Eventually the site started developing its own identity.

Blue and white. Clean typography. A mixture of technology and editorial design without looking like the website of a software company.

And the name became part of the design itself:

LIFE IN PRODUCTION_

The blue IN represents the bit we’re all currently stuck in, and the blinking underscore is a small nod to the terminal windows I’ve spent far too much of my life staring at.

There are sections for the things that actually make up my world rather than whatever subjects supposedly make a successful blog.

Life.

Family.

Tech.

Football.

Photos.

And whatever else ends up here.

There will be no carefully engineered content strategy and no desperate attempt to turn every visitor into an email subscriber.

Sometimes I might write something useful.

Sometimes it’ll just be something I want to remember.

Both are good enough reasons to write it.

Building it with AI

There’s another part of this project worth documenting.

I didn’t build it alone.

A significant amount of the design, troubleshooting and development happened through conversations with AI.

Not by typing “make me a website” and waiting thirty seconds.

It was much more collaborative than that.

I’d decide what I wanted, we’d work through ways of doing it, I’d deploy changes, something would inevitably break, we’d figure out why, fix it and move on to the next idea.

Sometimes the AI suggested something clever.

Sometimes I rejected it.

Sometimes I suggested something that turned out to be a terrible idea.

And sometimes we both spent far too long trying to understand why three pixels of CSS refused to behave.

It became less like using a website generator and more like having an extremely patient developer sitting next to me.

That experience will probably become a post of its own.

So what happens now?

I suppose I actually have to write something.

That’s the funny part.

I’ve spent all this time building somewhere to put stories before writing many of the stories themselves.

But perhaps that’s exactly why I wanted to do this.

Life moves ridiculously quickly.

The kids get older.

Technology changes.

Projects come and go.

Football seasons provide varying levels of emotional damage.

Photos disappear into enormous camera rolls and moments that seemed unforgettable somehow become difficult to remember.

So I’m going to put some of them here.

Not everything needs to be profound.

Not everything needs thousands of readers.

Sometimes it’s enough simply to record where you were, what you were doing and what mattered to you at the time.

And if somebody else enjoys reading it along the way, even better.

Welcome to Life in Production.

It probably has bugs.

But it’s live.