the build journal
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Week 13: 3-13 — eleven rounds, two decks, one argument
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Three Thirteen is the card game at our table. Eleven rounds; the deal starts at three cards and grows to thirteen; whatever number just got dealt is wild. It teaches in one round and lasts all evening, and for years the scorekeeping has run on paper pads I print myself, which works right up until…
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Week 12: minneapolos — the pun was the easy part
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Some domains get bought because of a plan. minneapolos.com got bought in January 2024 because the word made me laugh: Minneapolis with polos hiding inside it, a whole product category folded into a city name like a note passed in class. It has sat on the shelf for two and a half years waiting for…
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Week 11: reviewatron — the idea that had to earn its way back
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Week 11 was supposed to be powerballer: a parody blog so thoroughly pre-built that shipping it from a cruise ship required exactly one command. I did not run the command. There’s a lesson in that which has nothing to do with bandwidth and everything to do with appetite: a joke you were delighted by in…
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Week 10: cve.social — the week the ocean won
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Week 10 had a plan, and the plan had a certain glamour to it. I was going to stand up my own corner of the social internet from a deck chair in the middle of the Atlantic: a Bluesky handle that is just my domain, and behind it a small self-hosted fediverse server humming on…
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Week 9: cabinchoice — the name wanted the woods
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Some weeks you build the idea you planned. This week the domain overruled the plan. cabinchoice.com has been on the queue since the start as the flagship: cruise-ship cabin reviews, because picking the right stateroom is the best decision a cruiser makes after picking the ship, and the official deck plans are no help at…
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Week 8: The flip sprint — what a clever name is actually worth
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I have a domain-buying habit. For years I’ve registered names the way other people buy lottery tickets: see a clever combination that’s somehow still available, grab it, picture the thing it could become. Most of them became a line on a renewal invoice. This week I finally did the thing I’d been avoiding, which is…
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Week 7: gopherguts — the part of a guide that isn’t the writing
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I’ve owned gopherguts.com since a past life and let it sit for years. The name is too good to waste: Gopher for the University of Minnesota, guts for the honest, in-the-trenches version nobody puts in the official brochure. This week it became what it should have been all along — an unofficial guide to being…
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Week 6: Cape Coral Things — three real photos and a fake owl
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I spent part of the summer in Cape Coral, and I came home meaning to build a little firsthand guide to the place. The pitch was simple and, I thought, easy: a running list of what’s actually worth your time down there, written by someone who’d been standing in front of it. Not a listicle…
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Week 5: workspacemarket — a marketplace built from the editor
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workspacemarket.place is a secondary market for daily workspace reservations at Universal Containers. Hoteling means nobody has an assigned seat: you book a desk each morning, the good ones go fast, so the site lets you buy the right to a colleague’s reservation for a day. The window seat the week of the sales convention. The…
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Week 4: exfedjobs — useful to people having a hard week
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I registered exfedjobs.com in January 2025, when it was becoming clear that a lot of federal workers were about to be looking for work. Then, like most of my domains, it sat there. This week I finally built it, and it turned into the most carefully-handled thing I’ve made for this project, because the audience…