Today marks the one year anniversary of my first post on this website. Here’s what it looked like then:

I’ve learned quite a bit about web development and design since, though I still consider myself an amateur. My self-education has been haphazard and I’ve managed to break features (or the whole site) a few times. (In fact I just noticed a busted feature while writing this post that I need to go fix.) I’m sure the underlying code could be more elegant, but it’s functional and I’m happy with the site’s public-facing aesthetic. I’m also glad I decided to use a static site generator like Hugo rather than trying to do everything from scratch — which, frankly, would’ve been a disaster.

One thing I didn’t realize before trying to build my own website: Solving web development problems is extremely satisfying. It can be frustrating in the moment when something doesn’t work. But when I finally stumble my way to a solution, the results are immediate and obvious. It sometimes reminds me of what it’s like to labor over a single sentence, searching for exactly the right word (instead of the almost right word), though the outcome of fixing a coding problem is often far more obvious and drastic.

Anyway, I wanted to use this anniversary as chance to reflect a bit on what I’ve done with the site over the past year and to highlight some things that didn’t work as well as I’d hoped. Thanks for being here! I hope you’ll stick around and keep reading my stuff for another year.

Stuff I’ve done #

• I published 46 posts, including film, zine and comic reviews; link roundups; and personal essays. Some of my favorite pieces from the past year include:

  • It feels strange to review something that destroys you (March 4, 2025)
  • Sometimes I turn incoherent thoughts into something like gold (May 21, 2025)
  • What use is obsessive journaling? (June 4, 2025)

• I started the process of archiving my writing from older blogs (including Lost in Panther City and posts from my bookstagram account) under the Projects tab. I’ve still got quite a lot of work before those sections are finished, but one of my goals with Unimportant Bird dot com was to give my writing a permanent home that isn’t dependent on the whims of Meta or Substack.

• I set up a newsletter (through Buttondown) so folks could receive new posts by email. I don’t use analytics on the site, so subscribers to the newsletter are my only real metric for readership. (I’m not totally happy with how I’m using the newsletter and I might change things up — more on that below.)

• I created a page to track my reading under the Projects tab. Curious about how many books I’ve read since 2014 (when I first started keeping track)? Well, it’s all there, including my dismal new low for 2025, which I think was my worst year for reading since I started keeping the list.

What hasn’t worked #

• My writing was inconsistent, at least in terms of output. That was especially true in the fall of 2025 when I was overcommitted to other things and didn’t carve out time to post here. I would also love to be the kind of person who is able to blog on a set schedule — but so far, I’ve found that to be impossible.

• I experimented for a while with doing link roundups. I’ve got a strong sense of nostalgia for the era of the web when linkblogging was common, so this was an attempt to bring that back in a small way. But I found it just wasn’t sustainable, at least not at the near-daily pace I aspired to. I’m thinking about revisiting this idea but paring it back to a once-every-month post that includes, not just your typical #longreads or whatever, but also cool random things that I discover online. (These do still exist, I promise.)

• I also experimented with a series I called “Marginal Notes” when reading Joan Didion’s Political Fictions. The goal there was to essentially rework notes I was taking into posts that were less formal than a traditional book review. I don’t hate how those turned out, but doing those pieces made me realize that I’m just not very good at informal writing. My instinct is to polish and fiddle with and rewrite things, which is completely at odds with the spirit of just posting notes as I read. For now, I think I’ll go back to writing about books when I’m done with them.

• The newsletter: I realized late last year that part of my inconsistency in posting stems from the fact that publishing new writing on the website requires a lot of extra steps. (This is the price I pay for eschewing a platform like Substack: Everything just requires more work.) I’ll spare you the technical details, but sending out every post in full via the newsletter — including photos, working links, etc. — is one of those extra steps. To be clear, I’m going to continue sending posts this way! But I need to make the process less cumbersome, whether that’s by automating the newsletter, sending abbreviated posts (meaning you’d have to click through to the site itself to read the whole thing), or some other solution I haven’t thought of yet.

One final snotty and maybe even spiteful observation #

Earlier this month, tech journalist Casey Newton decided he needed a new personal website:

For more than a decade, I had hosted a simple, business-card style website using Squarespace. I had never been particularly happy with the design, but had grown tired of wrestling with Squarespace’s rigid templates. I was, for some reason, paying the company almost $200 a year for a static page that did nothing for me.

Replace “Squarespace” with “Wordpress” and that basically describes my situation in January 2025, right before I launched this site. But rather than building something himself, Casey decided to try his hand at “vibe coding” — i.e., telling Anthropic’s Claude Code to build a website for him. (You can see the results here and read about the process here.)

Does opting to do things the hard way rather than outsourcing my web development to generative AI make me a better person?

Maybe not.

But the next time I break something, at least I’ll know that I’m the one responsible for that mistake — and I can actually feel proud when I finally manage to fix it.