I rebuilt my own website, and it took exactly as long as you'd expect

For eight years this domain was a Google Sites page. You make a site there in about an afternoon, which is the entire appeal and also the entire ceiling — because that is genuinely all you get. A grid of products, a paragraph about shipping, and a page that looks the same whether you did anything interesting or not.

I have wanted out of that for roughly two years. What finally pushed me was realising I had started thinking of the site as something I maintained rather than something I made, and that is a bad way to feel about the place your name is on.

What changed

The site is no longer a shop with a blog bolted on. It is the reverse: a maker diary that happens to contain a sewing line. Four threads now —

• Making — the sewing, and the slow business of doing it properly
• Baking — because there is always baking
• Lifestyle — the ordinary texture of a life that is currently half-runner
• Studio — the admin, the money, the decisions nobody sees

The sewing work is not going anywhere. It will sell again when there is stock to sell. But the merchandise was never the interesting part, and pretending otherwise was making the whole thing smaller than it is.

There is also no checkout here. Everything in the current collection is sold out — all twenty-five pieces — and bolting on a payment button to a site that cannot deliver anything would be theatre.

The bit I did not expect to spend a night on

I moved the hosting first, which everyone warns you not to do, and then watched the site go dark for a few hours because I had pointed the domain at nameservers where no such site existed. Nothing lost, everything recovered, but I did get to experience the specific flavour of panic that is entirely self-inflicted.

The fix was boring once I stopped panicking: create the zone first, verify the records landed, then move the nameservers. I had these steps written down in order and still skipped ahead. Writing it here so I remember.

What it is actually built on

I rebuilt it on Astro with Cloudflare Workers doing the hosting — which means it is fast on a phone, it is basically free, and it does not have a CMS attached to it, so there is nothing to log in to and nothing to pay for.

The part I like most: I write the entries as plain text files. No login screen, no database, no monthly fee, and no way for a platform to change the price or shut the door in five years’ time. The writing is a folder on a disk, and that is it.

That mattered more than I expected it to. A place that holds your work should be boring in the way it runs. Boring infrastructure is the kind of thing you only notice on the day it is not there.

What is still to do

Plenty, honestly.

• The sewing pieces need proper pages with galleries — I have four or five photographs of most of them and Google Sites only ever showed one at a time
• Four of the upcycled phone bags still need sorting out; I know which photograph is which colour but not which colour belongs to which name
• An email list, eventually, rather than making everyone find me on Instagram

None of it is urgent. That is rather the point.

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This is the first entry in a diary I intend to keep badly and irregularly, which is the only kind there is. If you want to know when new things land, that is here.