Using CSS Custom Properties As Design Tokens (Without A Design System)
How I use plain CSS custom properties as a design token system for real projects. Spacing, color, and motion tokens. No Figma. No toolchain. Just code.
My writings
Dispatches from a life spent online.
How I Built an llms.txt For My Clients (And Why It Beats Your Sitemap)
I stopped obsessing over sitemaps and started shipping llms.txt files instead. Here is how I built them for real clients and what actually matters for LLMs.
Speed vs Correctness: What Youth Baseball Umpiring Taught Me About Production Deploys
Umpiring youth baseball taught me more about production deploys than any DevOps book. Both are about making fast, irreversible calls with incomplete data and living with them.
How I Evaluate a New Dev Tool (My 3‑Question Filter)
I run every new dev tool through the same 3‑question filter before it touches my real workflow. Here is how Cursor, Tower, and SecondsPro managed to earn their place.
Why I Still Plan My Week On Paper In 2026
I have tried every productivity stack you see on Twitter, but one thing never moved: a weekly paper planning note. Here is what it does that no app can touch.
20 Years of richardlemon.com – A Website Grows Up
What the Wayback Machine remembers about you – and what it says about where you're going.
What Is GEO And Why Your Website Needs It In 2026
SEO was for ranking in search results. GEO is for being understood by AI. Here is why that shift matters for your website in 2026 and what to do first.
The Scroll-Driven CSS Animation I’m Most Proud Of (After 4 Rewrites)
I built a scroll-driven CSS animation that took four full rewrites before it stopped fighting me. This is the build log, including the ugly parts and the final clean setup.
From Zero To Indexed: How Long My Self‑Hosted Ghost Blog Took To Rank
I launched a self-hosted Ghost blog on a fresh domain and tracked everything. Here is the real timeline from “hello world” to first Google impressions and clicks.
My Anti-GTD Todoist Setup: Flat, Fast, and Review-Free
How I run client work, side projects, and life in Todoist without GTD, weekly reviews, or nested hierarchies. A flat, fast setup that survives real work instead of theory.
Keeping Fit At 56: Why 70% Effort Beats 100% Hero Workouts
At 56 I stopped chasing soreness and started chasing repeatability. Three sessions at 70% beat five at 100% if you actually want to stay strong for decades.
My Exact OpenAI Prompt For Blog Posts That Don’t Sound Like AI
After three months of abusing GPT to write my blog, I ended up with a very opinionated system prompt. Here is the exact prompt, the banned phrases, the structure rules, and what actually mattered.