You are looking at the simplest possible personal website. Briztreadley serves my memory and my vanity, in equal measure.
And to achieve those ends, all that the software that runs briztreadley.com has to do is present the articles and photos in some sort of logical way.
In the 20-ish years that personal websites have been a thing, there have been numerous ways to do this. Programs I have used to make websites include but are not restricted to: Blogger, Movable Type, Coranto, Expression Engine, and Wordpress.
This current iteration of briztreadley.com is powered by Micro.blog. It’s adequate for what I want to do here, so that’s useful. It is much more suitable for me than Wordpress, cos Wordpress has a lot going on in the backend.
And I’m a big fan of the minimal but stylish theme that I have selected to display my articles. As you can see at the bottom of each page, it is called Mythos and it was designed by pastor in the US, Matt Langford. Nice work, Matt.
So five paragraphs in and you are probably wondering: “Is this the most pointless colophon in the history of personal websites?”
My writing environment is a program called Craft. And it is both a “word processor” but also a way of keeping all my writing work in one place, for reference. I’ve been writing in Craft for 5 years, and there are apparently 1157 documents in my Craft space, totalling perhaps around 400,000 words (although I think that estimate must be high).
So while I draft all my written work in Craft, both for work and church and personal projects, the output is used in various ways. Most commonly for work, I export a Word document. For church stuff, orders of worship for instance, Craft has an excellent way of sharing documents on the web, and I can specify the URL I want the program to write to at briztreadley.craft.me.
But articles for briztreadley.com? I was stuck in the archaic process of writing the article in Craft, and then select all, copy and paste into Micro.blog’s web back end. That’s not super clunky, but its also not all that smooth either. And to be frank, I am not a big fan of Micro.blog’s web interface. It IS clunky.
So what has Claude helped me put together, which spurred me on to write this page?
I now have a Shortcut which enables me to post to Briztreadley from Craft, with barely any friction. From Craft, once I am happy with the article, I can run the Shortcut ‘Craft to Micro.blog’ (I have it saved as an icon in the dock of my Mac) and boom the job is done.
If you are the only other person in the world who writes in Craft on the Mac, and publishes to a Micro.blog website, get in touch, I would love to share my Shortcut with you.