What it is
A yearly snapshot of my life published once a year as a static page. It’s part of the myles.garden ecosystem, following the same garden metaphor and pastoral aesthetic as all the other websites.
Who it’s for: primarily me as a personal record I can look back on, secondarily anyone who randomly stumbles into the site and wants a snapshot of my year.
Cadence: updated once a year, likely built over a few sittings in December and published on New Year’s Day.
Budget
| Type | Estimate |
|---|---|
| Money | $0 — Astro static site, subdomain DNS already covered by myles.garden |
| Ongoing costs | $0 — hosting/CDN already covered by other websites |
Time budget
Rough phases, assuming I reuse existing patterns from when I built myles.garden and clippings.myles.garden.
- Scaffolding (2-3 hours): new Astro subdomain, shared design tokens, base layout.
- Content schema (2-4 hours): Zod schema for the year’s sections (photos, watched, read, played, visited, etc.)
- Design pass (3-5 hours): page layout, section styling, responsive check.
- Content entry (variable 3-10 hours): the actual data entry: picking photos, listing media.
- Polish (1-2 hours): meta tags, OG images, schema.org.
- Launch (1-2 hours): need to figure out the process for launching while away.
Total build (~12-27 hours), most of it front-loaded in year one (schema and design). Future years should mostly be content entry, a few hours.
Sub-domain and naming ideas
Fits best as a Door (MB-n) given it’s an ongoing, real site.
The annual/tree-ring/harvest angle fits your existing garden metaphor well:
| Name | Angle | URL |
|---|---|---|
| Myles’ Rings | tree rings = annual growth marker, strong garden-metaphor fit | rings.myles.garden/2026 |
| Myles’ Almanac | classic “record of the year” connotation | almanac.myles.garden/2026 |
| Myles’ Harvest | annual yield, ties to garden | harvest.myles.garden/2026 |
| Myles’ Annum | plain, dry, on-brand for your understated naming | annum.myles.garden/2026 |
| Myles’ Ledger | record-keeping, less garden-flavored but clean | ledger.myles.garden/2026 |
The Pick: rings.myles.garden, it’s the tightest metaphor and reads well as a URL.
Site structure
rings.myles.garden/
├── 2026/ ← this year's archive
│ ├── photos
│ ├── watched
│ ├── read
│ ├── played
│ ├── visited
├── 2027/ ← next year (once it exists)
└── / ← index listing all yearsSingle long page per year, anchor-linked sections, matches the “read once, skim yearly” use pattern better than multi-page nav.
Content sections (starter list)
- Favourite photos
- Film & TV watched and enjoyed
- Books read and enjoyed
- New video games played
- Places visited
- Albums on repeat
Possible additions
- a one-line year summary
- a “started vs. finished” projects note
- notable meals/restaurants
- people-you-saw-most
Open questions
- Launch date: 1 January 2027 (for the 2026 archive), or 31 December 2026?
- Hosting: Where is this going to be hosted? I want to move away from Vercel in the future, but all my sites currently live there now.
- Launch-while-away: will this be a scheduled/automated deploy, or does it need to go out before you leave?
- Manual data entry, pull from existing sources, or a mix of both?
- Is it worth backfilling past years?
- What registry identifier (ala
MB-XXX) should be applied?
Risk / things to watch
- Scope creep on section list: it’s really easy to keep adding categories, but for the v1 it’s better to ship less and for 2027 to add what might be missing.
- Year-end time crunch: content entry competes with actual holiday time, it’s worth logging photos/media through the year now rather than reconstructing in December.
- Design reuse: build the schema and basic layout to be data-driven so year 2 is mostly about content entry and not re-building.