Notes, projects and opinions from a UK creator
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.
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.
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.
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.
For years the 404 on chrisjm.co.uk was a single line of grey text. Now it's a tiny corner shop with stocked shelves, a bell, a standing cat, and an open invitation to write to me. Here's how it got built, and the surprisingly decent numbers it produced in its first month.
My portfolio has a page for unfinished work: paused builds, dormant ideas, and one project I killed on purpose. Here's why the messy middle belongs on a personal site in 2026, how to label it honestly, and how to write project notes that stay useful to whoever wanders past.
Six independent UK sites — newsletters, workshop logs, a stubborn forum or two — that still feel made by a person rather than a platform. What each one gets right, why it earns a repeat visit, and how to build a shortlist of your own instead of outsourcing your taste to a feed.
A personal website is not a job application with nicer fonts. It's a place where someone should be able to hear you think. Five rules I keep coming back to, using this site — notes, projects and opinions — as the guinea pig.
Most of what ends up on this site was not written at a tidy desk with a plant on it. It was written on a train, on a table the size of a beer mat, somewhere between Crewe and Rugby. Here's what actually works when the Wi-Fi dies and the person opposite is on a very loud call.
No office, no team, no whiteboard full of synergy. Just a kitchen table, a slightly moody router and a weekly routine that mostly holds together. Here's the honest version of how ChrisJM gets planned, written and shipped — including the bits that still go wrong.
Every so often I reread something I wrote two years ago and wince. Here are five confident opinions from the site's history that I no longer hold — on posting schedules, social platforms, search, what counts as entertainment, and why I was wrong about wanting a bigger audience.