Websites revisited: we are all mollusks now
Why are all the zodiac animals vertebrates? A one-off joke about mollusks led me to create a weekly horoscope website that has been running since 2008. It is powered by a Perl script, features an (always) unlucky slug, and a dubious defence of the barnacle’s inclusion.
Davis Forever: The blog I never told anyone about (until now)
As I review lots of my past websites and blogs, it’s time to reveal one of the more unusual sites that I set up. I once secretly ran a blog under a made-up name, writing about strange goings-on in Davis, California. Here's a confession about it that I've never made before.
What my habit tracker app says about me
I track 15 daily, weekly, and monthly habits in the Streaks app — some go well, some don't. Here's what the current state of my habits in August 2026 says about me.
By 'eck, it's worse than Barnsley: my first website (from 1997)
Back in 1997, building a website meant typing HTML by hand. My first website was called 'By 'eck, it's worse than Barnsley’ and this post takes a nostalgic look at how this website came to be. I also discuss some of the features of websites built in the 1990s (web counters and guest books).
Search traffic is collapsing, direct traffic is booming: here's my data
Website analytics are getting harder to trust: AI search summaries are cutting overall traffic, while AI apps and tools are increasingly showing up in the vague "direct" bucket instead of being properly attributed. Using real data from three sites over 2024–2026, this post shows search traffic share collapsing and direct traffic share surging, and I conclude by asking what this all means for anyone trying to understand how their website is actually being used.
2,000 links and one new colour
For World Refugee Day, I helped launch CARE — a new resource archive on the Careif charity website linking to over 2,000 external resources on refugee mental health. Building it within the existing Squarespace site surfaced some real limitations, particularly around page hierarchy and folder structure, and prompted a new accent colour to distinguish the section. With the launch done, there's still work ahead on rethinking the content model and staying on top of link rot — but for now, I think I've earned a summer break.