My personal website is incomplete, imperfect

As I write, I have Zoom open in another window. Nine members of the IndieWeb community, including myself, have come together to work on our personal websites as part of Create Day. I decided to work on improving the maps feature on my site, which features several maps of places I have been around the world. For example, you can browse all of the coffee shops or eateries I have visited in New York City, with information about the extent to which I recommend each of them.

It all started with a question: “how could I share coffee shops I recommend to others?” That small idea led to my building a first version, then a second, and continually iterating. I added more coffee shops, I expanded my maps feature to include churches that I have visited (inspired by my trip to Rome, in which I took note of many churches I had visited). I am now thinking about maps for general eateries. I am re-thinking how I present maps; how can the user experience be better?

The way in which my maps feature was built was and is imperfect. I had a CSV file in which I manually tracked information about each cafe. I go to Google Maps every time I want to add a map and retrieve the latitude and longitude for the location I want to add. I write everything into a CSV row. I run a Ruby script that creates a markdown file which is then consumed by my Python static site generator. Every city – London, New York, etc. – had its own HTML page; updating the layout of that page involved making manual changes to all 10 or so pages.

Convoluted? Yes. Beautiful? I think so.

Every one of the oddities in which my maps were made came about because I wanted to either build something new and/or play around with a new technology. I made little changes when I had time, improving the maps directory bit by bit. No grand vision. I wanted a place I could share coffee recommendations on my own site.

I have been streamlining how my maps work today for Create Day. I have improved the UX, too. Navigating my maps is easier than it was. I removed broken features that were not worth maintaining (I don’t suspect anyone wanted the KML export of maps in each location that I offered, although I did learn how to write a KML file when I made that feature!). My maps are still imperfect, but a little less so.

Thus is the ideal nature of side projects: a place to play. And on this evening when I had nothing else to do, playing on my site feels exactly right.

Indeed, play is the root of many of my website features: the magic wand that takes you to a random blog post, the Christmas lights I just added to my website footer (I add them every year), the coffee emoji that changes during holidays, my “Moments of Joy” series, and more.

To all the American readers who read this on the day I wrote this post, happy belated Thanksgiving!