About
I created short obsessions because I had a thousand ideas but they rarely became anything.
It's not a blog, nor it is a shop. It's a collection of rabbit holes where you will learn, have fun and perhaps shop. But do not expect typical "Collections", "About", "Blog" sections. Expect to be confused...
You're always welcome to reach out to me with: "The video on your main page is driving me crazy", "ooo... I didn't know about the Indie Web. Thanks!". Or anything else... how you collaborate with the website will ultimately drive what the website becomes.
This is a place built for exploration. As today's web is created more with AI which uses "templates" and "safe" decisions, here I harness the power of AI* as a way to accelerate deployment of ideas before they become unexciting in my mind.
Experiments
I have a naive idea that in the age of AI agents scanning the internet, authenticity and "human creativity" might actually be able to surface above the companies which spend millions feeding us generic advertising. At least for a little while.. perhaps..
Since agents are using the same search engines as us, but at the same time have the capacity to open every link to see if it answers our questions, perhaps the "weird", "different" places will surface? The traditional SEO meta tags will no longer be sufficient when "clicking through" is done by bots.
The alternative is unfortunately what I call the "shallow web". That is, an internet where great things exist but we are unable to find them. If you are curious about "the other", wholesome internet, I suggest starting at www.marginalia-search.com
Design
I don't have the courage to call myself a designer. In fact,short obsessions' main goal is for me to release things before the self-doubt kills them. At the same time, I am sad that the free, open source internet does not care enough about design or about "non-technical" people. There exist countless free tools, resources, and software that are unfortunately inaccessible to anyone who is not "a programmer" or who is allergic to the aesthetics of Windows 98. Hence, wherever possible, I will try to share what I have learned in my countless "internet adventures".
Everything is because of something
Creating short obsessions is a personal journey across the "small web". Every decision (e.g. where to host the website, what font to use, what colours) is backed by an internet research adventure. Unfortunately, this means that the website becomes what it is very slowly. But perhaps that, in itself, is not the point.
Some questions I want to explore
- Can we create websites that are "discovered" without compromising authenticity?
- What if shops were about learning?
- What could a future online shop look like when "building" is cheap? Perhaps we can free ourselves from "templates" and "categories".
- I use Claude for building it. I'll share my process as openly as I can, but I want to be honest about what that actually means right now: Claude is a powerful accelerator if you already know how to build things, not yet a tool that hands that ability to someone starting from zero. It also means that building is fast, and hence it's tempting to build unnecessary things, instead of living.↩