I write and talk about WordPress for a living, and a personal site is a more honest place to show how something actually gets built than a case study ever is. This page is the parts of that story that don't change every week. The changelog is the parts that do, one shipped change at a time. Between the two, this is the whole thing, current as of the last time I touched it.
how this site works
How this site works
This is a fully custom WordPress theme. Hand-written (by AI) PHP templates, plain CSS, plain JavaScript. What you’re looking at right now is served straight out of files like single.php and page-media.php.
Nearly all of it was built through conversation with Claude, iterating this way over dozens of sessions rather than starting from a design file and translating it into code by hand. The changelog is the session by session record of that process, warts and dead ends included. This page is the current state summary, kept up to date whenever something material changes rather than after every small fix.
Dark mode here is a real toggle, not just a media query. It remembers your choice and matches your system preference on first visit. The site is also built to be readable by AI agents, not just browsers: markdown versions of every page, a discoverable skills index, and MCP-based tools that let an agent (including the one that helped write this page) read and update the site directly, with every write staged and confirmed before it applies.
Elementor Hosting
hosting, with Cloudflare CDN
v1.4.98
current theme version
0
third-party font requests
built with AI, session by session
anatomy
This site's anatomy
14 entries
Writing
Blog posts and essays, including biweekly issues of The Diff - all regular WordPress posts, not a separate content type.
8 entries
Timeline
The story so far, milestone by milestone. Powers the timeline on the About page.
38 entries
Press & Talks
Every podcast, talk, webinar, and article, each with its own page for the embed or link out.
6 entries
Events
Upcoming conferences and appearances, shown on the homepage until the date passes.
23 entries
Changelog
Every shipped change to this site, drafted by Claude at the end of each build session.
6 entries
Plugins I built
The custom plugins running this site, each with its own page below.
plugins
What I built to get here
Custom plugins, purpose-built for this site rather than pulled off the shelf. Each one exists because a specific thing this site needed didn't have a simple version already.
the checklists
What I check, and why
specification.website
Foundations, accessibility, performance, security, resilience
It checks all of it, and it's caught real things: 38 images on the media page with no alt text, a missing header landmark, animations that ignored a visitor's reduced-motion preference, fonts pulling from Google's CDN instead of shipping with the site. All fixed. A few items it still flags, a Content Security Policy chief among them, are a deliberate not-yet rather than something I missed.
headers.dev
Does every response actually lock itself down
Elementor Hosting doesn't give me server config access, so when this flagged missing X-Frame-Options and Permissions-Policy headers, the fix had to be a plugin of my own: MS Security Headers, built for exactly this.
isitagentready.com
Whether an AI agent can actually use this site
A different question from "does a browser render it correctly." It's the reason two of the plugins on this page exist: Make My Site Agent-Ready serves markdown versions of every page and an llms.txt index, and MS WordPress Abilities is what actually lets an agent, including the one that helped build this page, read and write to the site directly.
None of these are one-time passes. The site gets rechecked on a schedule, and the changelog is where the fixes show up as they happen.
93
performance
100
accessibility
100
best practices
100
seo
Latest Lighthouse scan, Jul 7, 2026. Pulled live from this site's own scan history, not hand-updated.
why this page exists