About this Site

I’ve moved through a lot of hosting platforms, both for sharing purposes and for coordinating teams (or coordinating guilds, almost 2 decades ago now). I’ve spent time with Wordpress, Blogspot, Github.io, GeoCities, Wiki tools, Google Docs, dashboard structures in Google Sheets and Microsoft Access/Excel, ClickUp, Trello, Notion, Roam, Obsidian, and others. Simply making a website was always an option if my intent was just to post content, and it wouldn’t have necessarily been challenging, however:

I’m more interested in understanding information management, sharing, and presentation tools generally than I am in just building one for my particular use-case,

Each tool represents the opportunity for “

fun⁠

”, in terms of trying to hack and bend its capabilities to my use-case(s), and

after putting in my 1,000+ hours with GUI and related development, both in early childhood shadowing family software/web work and otherwise being a general

code-monkey⁠

, I have very little to no interest in ever doing it again for any reason. So building a website from scratch with all the features I’d want, isn’t something I’d see as practicable or worth maintaining.

This isn’t to say I’m not interested in programming, which brings me to Coda and this site. Coda lets me focus entirely on the parts of programming I’m most interested in: data structure and creating structure out of unstructured data, mapping data to user experience, automating redundant tasks, and the ability to rapidly adapt and build tools for specific use-cases - while also providing me with the ability to share content.

In the first month and a half I had been using Coda, I managed to build:

all the features I had in my task management software,

all the features I had in my knowledge mngt. software, and

all the features I had on my previous personal site and then some.

In the months since, I’ve built:

Systems to assist with literature review

Testing frameworks for genetic algorithms

Full scale inventory management systems for small businesses...

However, I am still in the process of migrating some aspects of my previous two personal sites (github.io, obsidian publish, my first coda website) to this one, and even after this process is finished, I’ll regularly be testing and adding features - so please consider this site a perpetual work-in-progress. Further - the only real downside I’ve found with Coda so far, is the inability to draft a doc (this entire site is considered a “doc” in coda-speak) before pushing to publish. If it’s published, it’s published; edits are published in real time - a blessing and a curse. Drafting before publishing would effectively mean taking the site down or having to draft elsewhere without the ability to maintain dynamic in-doc links. So that being said, please take the phrase “work-in-progress” literally - if you see [[under construction]] at the top of a page, I am actively working on things that are on that page - possibly at the moment you are viewing it. Further, I cannot hide pages within a Doc from users, which means that the site’s variables are visible - so where you see a page begin with “SITE_”, keep in mind that this is not intended to be a published page, it is a page for containing controls and session variables. While this would normally be a deal-breaker for me, the fact that Coda meets my other needs so completely has convinced me to overlook it. The fact that I’ve found Coda to be better than any other tool developer I’ve interacted with in responding to the needs of their community, makes me hopeful that they’ll remedy this pain point soon. Coda has fixed this.

If you’re interested in trying out Coda, I cannot recommend it enough. Use this

link⁠

to sign up (free) and receive $10 credit (in case you decide to upgrade your account later).

If you find errors or have comments, reach out any time. Sign up for Coda and use this form to leave a note:

⁠

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