Inspiration for this site
2026-04-19meta
Previous versions
For a long time, I wanted to create a personal site. It originally started with the idea that I wanted somewhere other than Github to show off some of the coding I'd been doing and in year 1 of university I came up with a prototype that honestly was pretty rubbish. All it included was a slightly stuttery carousel of projects that I had done and a brief description of each and some typing hero text at the top; it got the job done but it wasn't really something I was proud of and wanted to represent me on the internet.
Fast forward to the start of my second year I was struck with what I thought was a really cool idea for the same kinda thing, this is where the clock idea was born.
I'd been reading The Time Paradox by Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd so I was spending a lot of time thinking about time. One of the most striking ideas from that book was that it was only in recent history that we had been ruled by a clock and what they called "clock time" and previous to that time was measured simply by structured events like the sun rise and set or the tides. Whilst it seems obvious after reading, this was an idea that hadn't really occurred to me before so it really stuck with me and I think it's where the original idea for a site that was ruled completely by "clock time" came from.
The core of the idea was that there is one main page to the site which simply shows a clock and every other page on the site can only be accessed at a specific time of day. I fell in love with the idea as I felt it was a really unique and interesting way to structure a site and it was definitely super fun to build, however I eventually realised that if I wanted to show off some of the coding I had done, gating the content behind time wasn't the best way to go about it so that site also never saw the light of day.
I still loved the idea of the clock though and I did want to incorporate it into a site somehow so I began on the current version of the site.
Coming up with pages
From inception I felt the room idea was the right one for me and I wanted the aesthetic to match the clock assets I had on V2 - a bit old but carrying an air of mystery and character. When designing the current version of the site I spent a long time looking at other interesting personal sites and websites across the indie web to gather inspiration for the structure and content of the site. Very quickly I knew I needed an about me page and of course a projects page but I felt I needed a bit more.
Everything began to take shape as each idea got a home starting with the about page in the painting. The projects gallery took form next and I knew I wanted that front and centre in the room so chose a big door image for it. The clock was the obvious next choice so I put in a placeholder for that. I had also recently started tutoring and I knew I should have a place for that on the site and I thought an old fashioned green chalkboard met the vibe I was going for and still felt appropriate for a tutoring context. From here though I was a bit stuck for ideas and this is really where the indie web browsing came in; almost all of the best sites had a blog page in some form or another and whilst I was skeptical that people really would want to read anything I had to say, I had very few other options and after all I'm certainly not making anyone read anything as it's buried away in my own website somewhere. The idea also got cemented when it became part of a really fun idea for the site that isn't fully implemented at the time of writing but is something I am really excited about and will hopefully be finished soon.
The clock pages
Coming up with twelve different pages for the clock was a bit of a challenge but a bit of help came from V2 of the site. On that version I had originally planned to have a different project behind each hour so I thought why not keep some of the more fun projects for the clock pages. Obviously I would have to change the aesthetics and UI of many but the core ideas and algorithms could be repurposed; as a result the sudoku, 2048 and bread AI clock pages were born.
The rest came from a variety of places, many based around the theme of the site being a slightly haunted lost house and went through many iterations, with some definitely still needing work as the concepts are a bit weak, namely hour 5. One of the most fun ones was hour 2 which is based around the idea of AI nonsense. The idea was that I would combine the look of a classic LLM webpage like ChatGPT with the vibe of a lost oracle and massively ham up the absurdity and vagueness of its responses to the point where they are obviously meaningless but still have the same tone and vibe as a classic LLM response but in archaic language.
I hope in this people may be able to see the absurdity of treating LLMs as some kind of all-knowing oracle and not applying critical thinking to their responses.
Originally it worked via a keyword bank with loads of different set responses for a number of topics but for the commentary and effect I was aiming for this didn't quite have the intended effect as the responses were often very tangential and not in the spirit of the question itself. As a result I thought why not use an actual LLM as that's the effect I'm going for, so it now uses Claude Haiku 4.5 with a nice little system prompt and I think it works wonderfully. The old responses are still there as a fallback just in case - in classic LLM fashion the API is down for whatever reason - so if you're lucky you might get a human written response for once.
Come back at a different hour
The site is still very much a work in progress and there are corners of it I haven't finished, look at the blue door for example (although that is planned) so there is more to come and I hope its something that can evolve and grow over time as it already has from the first version. I also hope that it is interesting and fun to explore and not just an insane brain child of mine that only I think is cool.
If you've found this post then you've already found the blog, which means you've had a look around but there is plenty to discover although you may have to come back at a different hour...