After an unscheduled hiatus I’ve activated the monocultured.com portfolio again – and this time I have something which is scalable and easy to maintain! It has categories! It also has a self-hosted shop!
The goal is to add most of the stuff I’ve produced over the years – photo, audio, writing – and have it as a repository and reference when I collaborate with others. It’s been awkward to curate what ends up on the page and what belongs somewhere else, but when in doubt I’m erring on the side of inclusion – if for no other reason than that it gives me somewhere to point people when they ask me what I’ve done.
Going through old projects I’m equally impressed with some of the ideas and projects, and disappointed that I haven’t done more. I have 30-odd years left in me, and I hope to add to my experiences and output until I croak. Hopefully I don’t have to update the infrastructure of the portfolio site for a few years now. Or until mandatory SSO age verification becomes a requirement for accessing the open Internet, I suppose.
On a technical note: I’ve migrated all my sites to Hetzner VPS, with the eager help of Claude to set up the migration of content, new Docker images and other installs. I could have done it all myself – since I’m lambasting AI so much I feel like I have to explain myself to you – but it would have taken much longer for me to klutz my way through, and some of the features I would just skipped since they’re so finicky. As it is, I can just drop a Github link into VSC and the clanker tells me if the repo does what I want it to do, and then deploy it to my server. Only occasionally breaking things.
I wasn’t thrilled about Big Cartel (the shop interface for Hintlab) since I’m selling so little that fees ate up any profit – all the small features really add up – so I had Claude code me the shop frontend and tie it to Stripe as a payment processor. I’m selling stuff both on hintlab.org and monocultured.com, with the ambition of adding some photography and print stuff to the latter, and keep the former focused on foresight/design.
You might have noticed that I’ve redone the theme of this blog to match the main site as well. Yes, AI did that based on my design system, which was nifty. I’ve tried to vibe WordPress themes before, but until now (Sonnet 4.6) I’ve never succeeded. I still don’t think Claude managed to follow the design specifications of how a theme is supposed to be coded (the sidebar is hardcoded, for example) but I’m happy enough with it. I still have to go through all posts, find duplicates and switch over from Gutenberg and whatever came before (this blog is old!) but that’s not related to anything AI-isch. I can’t imagine that anyone will ever read what I wrote 15 years ago – unless I end up on the news in some freak accident – but for my own peace of mind I just want to clean this place up.