You're early to the party…but Welcome, all the same!

(sounds of vacuuming)

(odors of fresh paint, with undertones of sawdust and carpet adhesives)

GAHH!!!

Oh, I'm sorry. You kind of startled me, there. I wasn't expecting anybody to show up here for another couple of weeks. But you found your way here, so…welcome!

(Just please don't spread the word just yet. Let's keep this a secret between you, me, and the countless spiders that index and scrape content on the open Web. I'll make a big splashy public announcement when everything's all set up. As you have obviously noticed, I've got some last-minute things to wrap up before I want people to come here expecting a Finished Thing.)

(Also: step carefully. Some things are broken. Problems are easier for me to spot, now that the site is an actual living thing and not…hypothetical.)

See, I've been planning this site for an awfully long time. Maybe you heard me talk about it? I shouldn't have been talking about it. But for many months, I was in a constant state of thinking that I was only about a month away from opening the doors.

I was also in a constant state of finding yet another something else that needed to be thought about, or looked at, or arranged. Some of these things were quite technical, some of them were matters of style or design. The damnedest ones were fundamental issues with workflows, editorial calendars…

…And the god-damnedest one was something so basic that it lacked enough shape and form to resolve itself into an explicit question.

I'll try to explain it: I'd built the planet and the atmosphere and the ecosystem (everything you'd find on the To-Do list of any reputable Old Testament-style deity). It was all pretty good stuff. Ah, but: over time, I came to realize that despite creating the Heavens and the Earth and the special added instructions for high-altitude baking on my new planet, I didn't have full control over what kinds of creatures would prosper here.

I absolutely had specific intentions, and a starter plan of the site's editorial theme. I'd sketched out a posting schedule and I'd also designed a series of regular features. I began writing stuff for this blog and I was pleased to find that most of my abstract plan worked very well, in practice!

At the same time, I gradually loosened my grip on the Grand Design. I started playing. Without the restrictions of a hard-set Launch Date, I could forget about any kind of rigid posting schedule and just write stuff that I was excited about writing.

I knew that this thing was truly standing on its feet when "spontaneous, serendipitous joy" had become rooted through the editorial plan. I'm sure there's a less-clumsy way to describe it. What I'm getting at is that you can't plan a project and add a new Kanban thingy or Mind Map node or whatsit labeled "Oh, and we need to diagram 90 minutes per block for Spontaneous Joy (reminders move to smartwatch notifications at deadline-plus-18-hours)."

It's terribly embarrassing to have missed so many of my self-imposed deadlines for the launch of this site. Most of those deadlines were tied to events on the tech calendar.

I'm glad that I waited for a Sign that thing was finally ready to take public. That sign came in the form of realizing that I had, for the nth time, come up with an idea that sounded like a fun idea to play with, and then spent two hours writing a complete first draft when my sole intent was just to open my Notes app and capture some thoughts before the idea was stolen away to the land of ghosts and winds.

(This Sign got a double-underscore when I realized that I was keeping one of my nice Bluetooth compact keyboards on the nightstand, for when "just a few bulleted notes" on my phone soon after awakening flowed into a for-real writing session.)

Which brings us to this morning. I picked a date when I will tell everyone that I've got this new blog/newsletter/member-supported thing, won't you please come check it out, please and thank you.

What's the opposite of "spontaneous, serendipitous joy"? It's the stuff on my final pre-launch task list. Much of it involves uploading a folder full of "about this site" stuff. No human being should ever be forced to publicly answer the question "Who the hell are you, and why the hell should I care about anything you do?" Is it any wonder I put off writing that page until now?

And much of it involves technical back-end stuff. I decided to take the site "live" on my Ihnatko.com domain ASAP, for three reasons that I think you'll agree are quite sensible:

1. During the two months since I canceled the Very Expensive Previous Wordpress Host for the domain, its DNS had somehow been hijacked by an Asian firm selling some sort of deer antler fluff. The photos were real pretty but it was probably best that I address the situation sooner rather than later.
2. When I make the final development of this blog visible to anybody who's interested enough to carefully and correctly spell my name into a browser address bar, it's going to be like lighting the end of a long fuse. There is a genuine sense of urgency. Suddenly, this is very real.
3. There was always a highly-resonant chance that I'd screw up all of the records changes so royally that it would take me weeks to clean up the blast zone, do it properly, and install a tastefull bronze plaque commemorating the spot where the disaster happened.

Item Three was by far the factor that demanded the most respect. I set things in motion this afternoon annnd…

Well, I'll be damned. It just kind of worked.

There was a single issue, which I was able to resolve by changing a single setting in my Cloudflare dashboard. Even so, the blank page that complained "This page isn’t working…site redirected you too many times" was an improvement over the green page filled with yellow Kanji symbols and sun-dappled photos of elk and deer.

(If I'm going to be totally honest: when I say "I was able to resolve it," I mean "I described the problem to Google Gemini, attached some screengrabs with my Ghost.io and Cloudflare configuration pages, and it quickly spotted the issue.")

I'm surprised and pleased.

Let's just call this unexpected blast of competence a Soft Opening.

Yes, I'll be enthusiastically accepting Memberships when I open for-real. The next thing I'm dreading is making sure that all of the banking stuff I had to wire in for that is actually working.

Until then, I hope you enjoy the content that's already public and the content that I'll be posting during the soft open.

And now if you'll excuse me…I need to get back to work. I haven't much time to either eradicate all of the possums from the kitchen or raise the $1200 that will entice the health inspector to misidentify them as line cooks. ⓘ