This site is a bit of an experiment in presenting a multifaceted version of myself. Any person is a diverse collection of interests, experiences, skills, all of which likely influence each other. I wanted to find a way to capture that in how I present the content on this site.

I could just use separate pages for each of these interests, and organize the project write-ups hierarchically - but one project or endeavor often combines many of my interests, and covers a number of cross-cutting themes in my work or relate to each other.

To different people looking at this site, some kinds of work may be more interesting - so I should have a way to quickly dive into photography projects, for example. But I’ve also written programs to help edit my photos, or compose them into zines - which someone interested in photography might like to use - but this person may not be one to dive into my “programming” section.

A graph-like structure quickly seems to emerge! Establish high level categories, and tag the different “works” into each structure. I’ll create a tag for photography, and a tag for programming - then surface my Digital Zine Machine in both places!

This is a prototype of the “display” view of what an ideal multi-media portfolio may look like.

Notion’s databases makes this particularly easy to do, and so it’s roughly what I’ve done here.

However - it’s not so simple as a single universal “tag” - What’s very important is the methodology by which you set your organization system. Not all “tags” might be evaluated equally - or even exist on the same dimension!

For the organization methodology, it helps to work backwards from what you need the methodology to do. I want to be able to let visitors to my site quickly dive into the slice of my work that they’re interested in categorically (like photography, or programming), and I want to create views that can adapt to the kind of work they display - drafts, final products, ongoing projects, etc.

Here I’ve created two “dimensions” to describe each piece of work, “Category” and “Type”. For me:

• A Category is the interest area or areas that a work falls into. so, Photography and Programming. A piece of work can correspond to many categories.

• A Type is describing the kind of work product this is. Is it a thought-piece? is it a link to a final video or app? Is it a first draft I want to put out there? or is it documenting a long-running project? I chose to make a work product only fall into one type.

This, in turn, helps me create dynamic views which indicate what’s what, and filter to only display the work I want to show in context.

AI-Assisted Content Creation

But here's where it gets really interesting - this whole system becomes much more dynamic when you add AI into the mix.

For example, the Deep Notes App page you might have just read? I created that entire entry through a conversation with Claude using Notion's MCP (Model Context Protocol) integration. I just talked through what I wanted to document about my notes app, and Claude was able to read my existing site structure, understand my tone from other pages, find related projects to link to, and create a whole new entry that fits perfectly into the graph.