Handmade in public

Evolution

The same website, days apart. Drag the slider to watch it grow — this is what handmaking a site looks like.

Day 1Day 2Day 4Day 4, later80sDay 8

September 16

The site is born

A homepage, a subscribe form, and a promise. Eleven books on the shelf and the first essay on the way.

The bigger story

Twenty years of writing, coming home

The slider above shows this site’s first days. The real story is more than twenty years long.

I would have told you I started blogging in 2006. The archive says January 12, 2005. My first post was called “Bananas.” I’ve been writing online ever since, always in someone else’s house.

This site is the first place that’s truly mine. My own site. My own server. All of it. It’s been a dream of mine for more than ten years. Now I get to bring everything I’ve written home, and keep every old link working.

How I got here

  1. 2005 – 2011

    A Blogger blog

    From “Bananas” to my last post on September 21, 2011, I wrote 682 posts. The blog later lived at blog.travishellstrom.com.

  2. Late 2000s – early 2010s

    Google Sites and project sites

    A simple personal site on Google Sites, around 2008 to 2010, plus project sites like Advance Humanity and Everyday Humanitarian. Those sites are gone now. Some pieces I could only find again in the Wayback Machine.

  3. About 2013 – 2025

    travishellstrom.com on Squarespace

    Articles, classes, Advance Humanity pages, and my whole Blogger archive, which Squarespace imported under /blog/.

  4. September 16, 2026

    This site

    Plain, handmade web pages. No platform and no page builder. Just files I can read, change, and keep.

Why owning it matters

For twenty years my words lived on other people’s platforms. Some of those places are gone now, and pieces of my writing went with them.

Now the whole site is a folder of plain files, and every change is saved in its history. When I send a change, my own small server picks it up and the site updates by itself. The same server handles newsletter sign-ups, the Saturday email, and the tools I write with. If a platform changes its prices or its rules, I’m not stuck. I can pick up my files and go.

I’m not doing it alone. I build it with an AI coding partner. I decide what we make and what it says, and the AI does a lot of the heavy lifting. By Day 8 the site had grown past 900 pages, most of them my old blog coming home. The tools have never been better.

How to move without losing anything

Squarespace’s export didn’t give me what I needed to move everything. So I stopped waiting for a perfect export button and used what my old sites already show the public. If you’re planning a move of your own, here’s what worked for me.

  1. List every old address. Your site’s public sitemap, usually at /sitemap.xml, is your checklist. Watch for doubles. Squarespace had imported my blog, so 680 of my 682 Blogger posts lived on both sites.
  2. Pull the words out clean. On Squarespace, adding ?format=json to a collection address showed me the data behind the page. My Blogger blog’s public feed gave me the full text of every post, without the menus and clutter.
  3. Rescue what’s gone. The Wayback Machine had saved pages from my old sites that no longer exist. Look there before you give up on anything.
  4. Bring every image home. Download, resize, and host every photo yourself. If the old account closes, borrowed pictures can disappear with it.
  5. Check every link. Old writing is full of links to places that are gone. Keep the good ones, fix what you can, and let the rest go.
  6. Give every old address a new home. Write down where each one lives now. When the old site points to the new one, each address gets a permanent redirect (a 301), so an old bookmark lands on the real post, not the homepage. Better still, keep the old path: my archive serves each old post at its exact old address, so most old links need no redirect at all.
  7. Move in waves. You don’t have to do it all at once. I started with my favorites, rebuilt by hand. Then I brought everything else over in one big archive.

Where I am today

Old addresses with a new home1,500 of 1,753

About 86% · as of September 23, 2026 · the rest will point to the closest related page, so none of them dies

On Day 8 the whole blog came home. Every post from Blogger and Squarespace now lives in the Blog, at its old address. Here’s some of what has moved in:

Where it goes next

I’m rebuilding one wave at a time. First the favorites, by hand. Then the archive: the Blog, every old post in one place, by year. Next come the last old pages still waiting for a home, like Advance Humanity and my projects, and more favorites rebuilt by hand.

When that’s ready, both old sites, travishellstrom.com and my old Blogger blog, will point here. Every old link will forward to the real post. The goal: no dead links left out there. And one day this site will live at travishellstrom.com itself.

I’m doing all of this in public so you can learn from it. If you dream of your own site and your own server, I hope this helps. If I can do it, you can too. Subscribe and reply to any Saturday email with your questions.

Built by hand, with the best tools there have ever been. The story of why is in Essay No. 001.