Overview Link to heading
I have long threatened to build a website. It’s a lot of work, even with help from my buddy Claude.
Timeline Link to heading
In 2002 I was getting pretty serious about computers after a few years of really only using them for music but I didn’t believe I could build my own website. So, I hired 2 different web designers for 2 ideas.
My 1st project idea was: a Phoenix-area music scene website that wasn’t terrible:
- recorded interviews with musicians I knew & liked
- recorded sessions like the kind I had done live at some radio stations in the Phoenix area
- a podcast (ground-breaking at the time…)
- reviews of releases & shows
- etc.
The name of the site was “Thermophonic.com 🔥💿”.
“Phonic” because it was focused on music / sound & it kind of sounds like “Phoenix”. Also, not sure if you’ve heard, but it’s quite warm there. Also, since it’s NOT REALLY A WORD IT MAKES THE SINGLE-WORD DOMAIN CHEAP TO BUY. I doubt I’ll be able to find the artwork. If I do, I will post it. The logo very much looked like a vinyl record wearing a hat made out of the little fire thingy from Donkey Kong…
Too hot.
Since I no longer live in Phoenix & this no longer interests me you can have the name for free. (I think it holds up for that idea.)
I hired a guy to work on it. He made some nice looking stuff, but, frankly, he was an a-hole. He didn’t have much interest in doing what I wanted him to do.
I know the relationship between client & designer can be fraught. I understand it on several levels.
I have been the “creative” in this relationship on many music scoring projects. Striving to get the music that’s needed while making something good while following the direction of someone who can’t explain what they want in musical terms is hard.
I also know quite a bit at this point in my life & career about the software business. I know how difficult it is to translate people’s desires into a working product, how tricky it can be to turn requirements into implementation details that result in a thing.
He was still an a-hole. So, it never got finished.
My 2nd project idea was: a site, like this one. Back then, to make a site like this I would have had to learn all sorts of things I did not know. PHP, CSS, HTML, DNS, hosting, blah blah blah…
I hired a girl who was great! She understood intuitively exactly what I wanted, she made creative suggestions that enhanced my requests, her work was affordable & we got along really well.
I never finished the project.
So, fast forward to, I don’t know, when YouTube started becoming not just that weird video site but “YouTube”. The place where people were actually making money from posting videos of their stupid hobbies. I was like, wait, I have a stupid hobby. I have all of this stuff I could make talking-head videos about & I could have a site that complemented the videos. I think I could have INVENTED sYnThYoUtUbE™!
I didn’t & though at that point I pretty much knew everything I needed to know to start my own website, I didn’t.
In 2014-2015, everyone seemed to be building Hugo sites. Static-generation, text files, themes - all you had to do was create content, host it somewhere & publish.
I never did it.
But, now, I have done it. This is that site, such as it is. In 2025. 23 years late.
Files Link to heading
The repo for this site is https://github.com/nonpunctual/nonpunctual-site. There is not much to see there.
When pushing from the local dev environment to GitHub, a GitHub Action is executed in the nonpunctual-src repo that runs the Hugo build command. This generates a “minified” version of the site HTML from which a branch is built. That branch is written to nonpunctual-site. It contains the data needed to publish & serve nonpunctual.org & nothing else.
I am using GitHub Pages for hosting. Repos used for GitHub Pages hosting must be set to public for non-enterprise GitHub accounts, but using this dual-repo config allows me to keep my Hugo source, draft content & issues private in nonpunctual-src. Neato.
This gives me a lot more control over what’s published vs. what’s in draft. By keeping it private I am not (really) meaning to hide anything other than my laziness & my tendency to keep things in draft for a very, very, very long time.
I plan to make everything about how I’ve built the site available right here on this page! Stay tuned for more.
“Gear” Link to heading
You start with a theme, the best intentions, a few aesthetic choices your AI pal says will be a breeze to implement & it rather quickly devolves from there…
- Hugo using the hugo-coder theme
- some custom CSS & JS
- Code syntax: Nord style
- Cloudflare (image hosting)
- GitHub Pages (hosting)
- GoDaddy (domain + DNS)