Notes, projects and opinions from a UK creator
A mate handed me a library printout of one of my posts and it was a mess of navigation, banners and a hero image the size of a tea towel. So I spent a weekend teaching ChrisJM to behave on paper — here's the ugly first draft, the ink-cost reality check, and the short list of things every personal site should let you print.
Someone asked what it costs to run this site and I said "less than a Friday night curry." They pulled a face like I'd said the moon is made of cheese. So here's the actual arithmetic — domain, hosting, backups, the lot — and why a small bill is the whole point of ChrisJM.
Search engines, AI summaries and scrapers all turn up at ChrisJM sooner or later. This is a look at the small choices that keep the site speaking to a person — from headings that make sense out loud to contact routes you can actually find.
Somewhere along the way I stopped treating ChrisJM like a shop window on a street nobody walks down and started treating it like the little café round the corner. Here's what I ignore now, what I actually watch instead, and how writing for a handful of familiar faces has quietly changed everything I publish.
My About page used to read like a conference lanyard: name, role, list of skills, please hire me. This week I rebuilt it as a small room with a spare chair, a kettle on the go and three easy ways to say hello — here's the before, the after and why it finally feels like ChrisJM.
Most footers are where websites go to die — a grey strip of copyright and broken social icons. I've been treating mine more like a pub garden: somewhere to slow down, put your drink on the table and decide whether you fancy another. Here's what lives at the bottom of ChrisJM and why.
I handed a friend three small tasks on ChrisJM and put the kettle on. What followed was eight minutes of squinting, backtracking and one very telling muttered 'where's the...?' — a tiny usability session that taught me more than any tidy checklist.
Running a small personal site is a bit like keeping a front room tidy: you notice what makes guests uncomfortable. Here are five internet habits that have been politely but firmly escorted off chrisjm.co.uk — and the quieter, friendlier things I've put in their place.
A village hall noticeboard is a masterclass in information design: layered, local, low-tech and refreshingly honest. Here is what its pins, curling corners and handwritten cards have taught me about making ChrisJM feel useful again.
Somewhere along the line, blogging started to feel like homework: 2,000 words, an FAQ, and a table of contents. I've been going the other way — shorter posts, published on a Tuesday lunchtime, before the tea goes cold. Here's why the two-paragraph post is often the more honest one.
A /now page is the antidote to the About page that quietly fossilised three redesigns ago. Here's why I keep one on ChrisJM, how I write it without turning it into a humblebrag, and a three-bullet template you can pinch.
I've added a public errata page to ChrisJM — a running list of typos, retired takes and links that quietly died. I expected it to feel like a detention slip. Instead it's turned out to be the most honest page on the whole site, and the easiest one to keep.
Every December I think about relaunching the whole site and every December I run out of December. This year I'm trying something smaller: twenty-four micro-jobs, one a day, no project manager required. Here's how it works, what counts as 'tiny', and why a broken link is a perfectly good Christmas present to yourself.
A short, slightly stubborn case for keeping chrisjm.co.uk on the .co.uk flag rather than chasing the .com. It is not about patriotism or purity — it is about what a tiny suffix signals to UK collaborators, curious visitors and, frankly, to me when I open the site to write.
For a long time I opened my analytics before I opened my email. This is what happened when I took the dashboard off chrisjm.co.uk, stopped counting every visit and went back to making the site for people rather than percentages.
Most personal sites have an about page and a contact form, but very few have a colophon. Mine is a short, honest note about the tools, type, hosting and accessibility choices behind chrisjm.co.uk — and it might be the most useful page you are not building.
Guestbooks were meant to be dead, killed off by social media and spam. But in 2026 a simple, moderated guestbook still does something the big platforms cannot: it lets a reader say hello without joining anything. Here is why mine is staying, and how I keep it GDPR-friendly and spam-free.
Everyone wants the big relaunch; almost nobody does the small stuff. Here's the twenty-minute Sunday night routine that actually keeps ChrisJM alive — four jobs, one checklist, and no ambition beyond leaving the site slightly better than I found it.
A contact form on a one-person site is a bouncer with a clipboard. A plain email address, a short list of what lands well and an honest note about reply times does the job far better — and makes the whole site feel like a person rather than a portal.
Every few months my list of side projects turns into a tin of assorted biscuits where half of them have gone soft. Here's the entirely unscientific sorting method I've landed on, why it works more often than it should, and the two places it falls flat on its face.