I always knew I was going to have us build me my next website, but when we started Tiger Pajamas, I did not yet know what my next web site would be about. Turns out it’s… automobile racing???

Well look, you can find out what that’s all about on turningfortune.com, but what I want to say here is, first of all, Ash and Phil are amazing at this. You should hire them. I did, and look how that turned out. But also, I want to say that this project fully realized stuff I have been working on my whole career in every single job I’ve had about building publications on the web. Web site nerds who read web sites like tigerpajamas.com should really check out Turning Fortune on that level.

In my career, I’ve had to use pretty much every godawful CMS and arcane web stack under the sun, and I just had to build whatever I could on them. I got to develop my ideas of how web publications should work on the front end, but it was always a nightmare under the covers. Like anyone who works in The Industry™, I have pined for the RETVRN of static sites, and when I built my first personal hobby publication — which I’m afraid the Wayback Machine can no longer recover for some reason — it was with a deeply hacked-upon Octopress engine. The reason I didn’t keep that one up was obviously not the hosting bill. It was that I had designed it too ambitiously as a publication, and the editorial load was too much for me to bear.

I have had a few more 9-to-5 web jobs — and concomitant side hustles — since then, and it has refined my sense of publication design down to a very sharp point. I have known from day 1 that The Blog — like, the personal toilet-paper-roll web log from 2003 — was such a foundational web publishing format because it was the website manifestation of The Side Hustle or hobby project, and that it created concepts that could be adjusted to accommodate any lifestyle without overwhelming the author. Most blog authors did become overwhelmed over the years, but I would argue this is the fault of their inflexible tools and the requirements they impose. People whose hobbies and side projects fit into the medium exactly are still posting on those sites 25 years later for a reason. My thesis is that The Blog rules because it has a mental model that can be realized entirely by a static website. That is, it’s comprehensible to a human being.

By the time I set out to create Turning Fortune, I had totally internalized the capabilities of static sites, and so every feature of the publication was one that had to fit into my head completely — every single teeny tiny little piece. And it turned out that a lot could fit in there. I could conceive of an entire motorsports magazine full of editorial features that could all be developed and deployed statically, and it would essentially be made of several blogs stapled together. I specced it out that way, and Ash was able to design it, and Phil was able to build it. What we have launched today is exactly the site I had in mind at the very beginning with zero compromises. And at least until it becomes the #1 racing news magazine in the world, it is FREE to host, because it’s a static website for human beings and not a vibe-coded dynamic monstrosity.

So I want to say to people in editorial at big places — not just indies — consider having a real web site. As long as your content and your business are conceived of in a humane way, you can put it on the web using humane technology.