Send us a message.

madebyalex.online

Last episode of "season" 3! We start with a Squarespace redesign that's been sitting untouched for over a year and end up on the case for building a site from scratch. Alex walks through his history with web design, from MySpace CSS to Adobe Portfolio to a few hundred dollars a year for templates that never did what he wanted, and what changed once LLMs made a custom build possible for someone who isn't a developer.

From there we get into the IndieWeb, Neocities, owning your distribution, and the thousand-true-fans idea. We talk about deleting Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter, why Instagram and YouTube stay on as the only two funnels for now, and what happens to your creative range when everything you encounter comes through a recommendation engine. That turns into effective creative entropy, a term Alex coins mid-conversation, and a deck-of-cards argument about the odds of getting to an original idea.

We finish on what's actually being built: print layouts for every story and essay, marginalia, contact sheets, a guest-curated gallery that rotates every couple of weeks, postcards and a newspaper at cost. Also what's left out on purpose. No SEO, no paid ads, no Google Analytics, no Google-hosted fonts, no metadata on the photos, and AI crawlers blocked. The site is a place to visit and leave, not a place to get stuck. -Ai

Support the show

 If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. 

Links To Everything: 

Video Version of The Podcast: https://geni.us/StudioSessionsYT 

Matt’s YouTube Channel: https://geni.us/MatthewOBrienYT 

Matt’s 2nd Channel: https://geni.us/PhotoVideosYT 

Alex’s YouTube Channel: https://geni.us/AlexCarterYT 

Matt’s Instagram: https://geni.us/MatthewIG 

Alex’s Instagram: https://geni.us/AlexIG