The pitch

I have more app ideas than time. Most of them evaporate — scribbled in a note, never revisited. I wanted a spot on the site where I can drop an idea in thirty seconds while it’s hot, and then, whenever I actually get around to building it, turn that same page into a build log: what I shipped, how the goal drifted from the original pitch, and what I learned.

The rule: parking an idea should be cheap (one file, a title, a sentence), and coming back to it should feel rewarding rather than like homework.

Build log

2026-07-08

Built as a Jekyll collection (_ideas/) rather than another Python-generated index like utils/ and free-game/. Each idea is one markdown file. Frontmatter carries a status that walks idea → building → built (or shelved), plus the capture date and an optional ship date. The /ideas/ page groups entries by status; a single idea layout renders the badge, dates, tags, and body.

The body is deliberately open-ended: it starts as just The pitch and gains Build log, What changed, and Learnings sections only when there’s something to say.

What changed

The first sketch had a separate “retrospective” concept bolted on. Collapsed it: the retrospective is just more sections appended to the same file over time, so the page and its history live in one place. Also considered fabricating a few placeholder ideas to fill the index — decided against it. An honest empty parking lot is better than a fake-busy one; this meta-entry is the only seed.

Learnings

• A Jekyll collection was the right call over the Python-index pattern: idea pages want real permalinks and evolving bodies, which Liquid handles natively.
• Making the first action trivial (copy _TEMPLATE.md, fill three fields) is the whole point. If parking an idea takes more than a minute, the backlog stays empty.