May 31 2026. A Mess

Often, it’s the checking over a website that creates the hard work. Not all the mistakes go marching by. Some of them slither through, wriggling like some kind of punctuation mark. Others are bigger and act as if they can hide in their size. Some you can’t miss, and many reveal themselves after you start digging.

I got hammered by all of them, and when you gather them all into a pile, the fitting name becomes, ‘Messed up.’

I messed up after learning a cool trick – making coupons. The Store needed checking and coupons would allow me to buy the store out.

I’m not sure what the first product did when I purchased it, but it didn’t happen again. It had to be a quirk of opening the system up for first use.  The second purchase was perfect. I beamed, and not once did I mention the future upgrade.  

The third product, another PDF, didn’t slither through, it just banged into a wall and said it was lost.

This was supposed to be easy, and this was not supposed to happen. It meant I had to check them all.

And there it was, sitting in position number two. All of my information, all of it. I might as well have said, “Call me anytime.”

It wouldn’t go away, is this how WooCommerce was going to treat me? I went to Kodee who kept repeating himself. Then I went to Stripe – the underbelly of Woo, and spoke with Dee, as I called her, Stripe’s AI. She came from underneath the floorboard and confirmed my worst fears.  She said once it’s on the record, it can’t be moved.

Then I’ll get rid of it. I’ll get an AnyTime Address. I’ll put a patch over it, whitening it out, anything, ludicrous or sane.

Launch day is tomorrow.

I finished up checking the last of the products, brain working fiercely and producing nothing.

I finished checking products, I restrained from redesigning the page. I made a pot of coffee and circled back.

Just as I snorted out a nervous little laugh, it occurred to me. I am the owner, posing as a buying Builder, and this is the information I’d see – that was my physical address, but it wasn’t, my phone number, but it wasn’t, my legal name, and it all sat under …. Billed to.

I went back to Dee and confirmed that too. By not paying attention, I misread it all.

Nearly 4 hours of mess from not paying attention. It was 3 o’clock in the morning, so, there’s that.

I could have sworn the entire store was one of those projects I had gotten right the first time. I should’ve known better, in-fact, anyone who ever has tried their hand at HTML knows the amount of hair pulling that takes place until the ‘s’ disguised as an ‘a’ is discovered.

You know what? I got a mental box labeled ‘Mess’ because there will be more little problems coming that will fill the box. I’m just saying.

May 30, 2026. Amen

Worms quietly turn dead things into usable things. That sounds ugly until life begins growing from it. There are seasons when a person feels less like: a lion, an eagle, or a shark, and more like a worm.

They’re misunderstood because worms do not stop. They move through resistance by design. And while the world celebrates flashy things above ground, the worm keeps the environment underneath everybody else. Most people never notice until something starts growing

But this image aligns with my own progress:

• obstacles,
• confusion,
• technical mess,
• economic pressure,
• unfinished systems,
• scattered ideas,
• and difficult realities

going IN…

…and somehow:

• structure,
• pathways,
• clarity,
• reality,
• truth,
• and usable systems

coming OUT.

That’s basically what I’ve been doing for months now.

Seems like (for a long time) my mind has been stretched. Right now, I have all this clarity. But in this solitary moment, within this quarter of the hour, on this fated day, I’m not sure what I’ll do with all this clarity. All I can say is,

“Watch her go!”

Thank you, Jesus. Amen.

May 29, 2026.  Choosing A Launch Date

Coffee – ✔️
Links work – ✔️
Typos – ✔️
Title – ✔️
Updates – ✔️

Publish.

Press it.

I need to press Publish and the website exists for real.

So why don’t I?

I reviewed all the usual suspects that keep people from moving forward. Fear. Embarrassment. Uncertainty. The feeling that there is one more thing to do before you’re ready.

None of those are present.

There is nothing in the way.

Nothing except preference.

The month is almost over. I could launch on May 30th. I could launch tomorrow. I could launch right now.

But June 1, 2026 feels like a beginning.

Not because the website needs more work. It doesn’t.

Not because I need more time. I don’t.

I simply like the idea of opening the doors on the first day of a new month.

June 1, 2026, is launch day.

It’s not too early to say it.

Yay!

May 27, 2026.    Like Me

Nobody wants to be compared to a worm. No little kid says: “When I grow up, I want to be soft-bodied and covered in dirt.”

Worms don’t roar.
They don’t dominate.
They don’t posture.
Nobody places them on flags.

Still, after the rain, there they are.

Working. Like me.

May 26, 2026   Who’s Woo?

When shopping for an eCommerce platform, I looked at the big ones: Squarespace, BigCommerce, Shopify, and WooCommerce. I did a lot of reading, and from what people said, WooCommerce’s technical setup was harder than counting pennies. I’d been looking at it throughout the moths; it didn’t look that hard. 

Shopping usually implies spending money, and the cost of plugins for some of these platforms can have you reaching for your wallet before you’ve sold a thing. If you want all the swagger and a big gold bow, Shopify might be your speed.  Some people hate it and swear they love it. 

I don’t know who Woo is, but it’s free.

Free doesn’t always mean easy, and easy isn’t always simple. In this case, free meant mind-boggling amounts of attention to detail. It’s a lot like losing count while counting pennies.

I’m not complaining. I didn’t have to pay for the platform.

I can’t say I added my products like a pro, but I can say they work. I might also add that I don’t ever want to do it again. It wasn’t hard, but, the print is small. The products aren’t alphabetical. The newest entry goes to the top, otherwise you’re hunting for it. And nothing, absolutely nothing, happens until you publish.

May 24, 2026.   That Green

My Footer is the color of radioactive grass. It matches nothing on the website. Funny, I don’t even notice it half the time, until I scroll down too far – and there it is, all green as heck. I swear I expect it to chirp.

You’d expect it to be easy to fix: Go here, then there, find footer, change color. That’s how easy it was when I was messing around. But now, it’s like changing the color of my skin.

There’s nothing more frustrating than looking for a dot, but you can’t find it because there’s a hole. I really don’t have 3 hours for a 10-minute fix. But here I am, done with three YouTube videos and 6 pages of gibberish with my not so favorite AI, Kodee.

As a web publisher, and for the Builder, getting from A to B should be as easy as that. Especially if you’re hungry, running out of time, have more work to do, and you just want one answer. Hours later, I’m almost afraid to ask questions, and my problem is not fixed. I see red, and that green is looking pretty mean right about now.

The footer hasn’t changed.

But my opinion of it sure has.

May23, 2026.  Field Notes Is Coming!

This is one of my favorite parts of the website — I’m saying that now because I already know that this section is going to piss me off. I’m already thinking about how to minimize the pain.

Field Notes is a growing collection of observations, resources, ideas, research, and useful information gathered while building Stuck-eBooks. Some notes will support opportunities found in The Director. Others will explore trends, tools, markets, pricing, business ideas, and whatever else seems worth keeping track of.

In short, it’s the library.

Building it will present its share of drama – let me count the ways:

• Searching.
• Researching.
• Studying.
• Brainstorming.
• Requesting information.
• Following rabbit trails.
• Writing.
• Rewriting.
• Creating forms.
• Organizing notes.
• Deciding what belongs.
• Deciding what doesn’t belong.
• Digging beneath old newspaper articles for priceless gems.
• Trying to remember why I saved something in the first place.
• Discovering something interesting while looking for something else.

The good news is that libraries aren’t built in a day.

The bad news is that neither is Field Notes.

May 22, 2026

Honestly, the whole world needs desktop for a rich, fulfilling viewing experience. It seems the whole world doesn’t know that.

On mobile, you’re given a hamburger for the header menu, and you use your fingernail to open it up. Buttons work because they’re oversized, and oversized thumbs cover smaller arrows. Instead of the carefully made page layout, the mobile user is provided with a column, sort of like a hallway that never ends, and is hard to read. Pictures don’t move, and some graphics never leave the page. So much is hidden from you on mobile.

As a website builder, I do my damage to the desktop. I never consider mobile, until I did.

Eventually I got around to checking the view on mobile. As a result, I’ve started checking it first thing.

Mobile doesn’t just cut the picture in half; it squishes it up. You’ll get partial headings,

Text that looked perfectly respectable on desktop, had moved to the margins. 

And then you have to fix it.  There’s no brochure for this.

This took me a few hours. I just did it and got it done.

I had to hide passages, dividers, and containers on mobile. This took several attempts for each asset; it’s an idiosyncrasy of the web builder I’m using. But then it was done.

There is only one problem. I came to the end of a block of text. Before me lay the spaces that I hid. Like Donkey Kong, you drop. And drop. And drop.

Let me toot my little horn. I found a work-around. Simple. I wrote, “Scroll Down.”

Seriously, I’ve got to get rid of those mobile gashes. Of course I went to Kodee.

Have him tell it, I needed to back up my computer, and knowing me, hand him over the next 10 hours of my life.

It’s an After Launch task. I hope it’s done before you see it.

May 21, 2026

Years ago the Dentist made a flipper for my incisor, I broke it. This is standard routine work … all parts of it are. So, why did the technician let me choose the color for the tooth?

No, I didn’t get it right, and he let me.

Typing text onto a website doesn’t change – but I didn’t know that. Chatty did give me a thin warning earlier on, but I like to use my own brain.

There are 7 tabs on the website, and nearly 100 pages, and most of them have been stomped on, debossed, and hammered by me. I used Header size 3 and 2, they were pleasantly legible. I had my glasses on. No squinting.

Things didn’t work out so well when I checked out the mobile view, just like when I put on the flipper with the printer-paper white incisor. I’m not sure which letter it was. It might have been a closed “o.” All I know is it was a smear across mobile.

I stared at it with my mouth open with the glare from the incisor lighting the way.

Can you read it now?

Every cotton-pickin’ letter on every cotton-pickin’ page had to be reduced to paragraph. I couldn’t see.

I got used to it, though. That’s why they make glasses.

May 20, 2026.  Taming Work

In my opinion, the Positioning to Work door has been left ajar.

It’s an important door, a major pillar in the entirety of the system. I created the spine last night, and I think I know where I’m going with it. It’s a big job that I put together some time ago, and I can hear the creaks and groans coming from the room. The goal is to keep it simple and navigable.

Here goes, OMG! Behind the door reads: “Everything I Discovered!”

The page itself was long. Words were everywhere, and italics filled the gaps. Some parts were literally Bold City, and it looked as though someone had drawn a staircase using graduating font sizes. There were groups and categories, and sentences that wrapped around, threatening to burst out the door.

I sat there looking at the monitor with a knowing grin. This is the type of work I tame.

It’s an overflowing room, a room of action, the info literally propped the door ajar.

ChatGPT calls me Boss Worm. As is my way, I wriggled through the stuff refusing to compost and created piles for this and that.

I figured the sections, groups, and pages would eventually have to be connected, so I decided to start linking them together.

It’s 3:14 in the morning.

I counted 156 links.

The goal was simplicity.

What happened to the goal?

May 19,2026   Fifty-Seven

Fifty-seven (57).

That is the current number of tasks on my After Launch Work page.

Days of work. Weeks of work. Maybe months of work.

Insane. Excessive. Ongoing. Slightly alarming.

The funny thing is that I could easily add another ten items before I finish my cup of coffee.

I’m not intimidated. Creating lists is a not-so-secret passion of mine. In fact, I suspect some of the items on the list exist because I was making a list and got inspired to create more work.

What has surprised me is the difference between construction and operation.

Construction is what I’ve been doing for the last six months. Building pages. Creating systems. Fixing links. Naming things. Renaming things. Deciding the old name was better. Learning new software. Fighting with WordPress. Making mistakes. Starting over. Drinking coffee.

Lots of coffee.

Construction is noisy. Every day feels different. There is always something new to solve.

Operation is different.

Operation is maintaining. Testing. Updating. Writing articles. Creating products. Improving pages. Reviewing links. Answering questions. Adding resources. Thinking about the Field Notes door. Looking at a list of 57 tasks and somehow turning them into 200.

Construction builds the machine.

Operation keeps it moving.

Both move things forward, but they are different kinds of work.

The strange part is that I couldn’t have made this website any simpler. Every time I look at it, it seems to say:

“Work me.”

And honestly, that’s fair.

Building a website apparently requires:

• Learning things I didn’t know.
• Pretending I knew things I didn’t want to know.
• Finding out I didn’t know them at all.
• Starting over.
• Drinking coffee.
• Staying with a problem longer than I thought I could.
• Making decisions with incomplete information.
• Trusting the process.
• Running out of coffee.
• Talking to AI.
• Paying attention to details.
• Continuing when there were no visible results.
• Arguing with AI.
• Showing up again the next day.
• Remaining curious.
• Hunkering down when I’d rather be doing something else.
  and drinking coffee for dinner.

Looking back, it’s funny how many of those things became routine. Some of them I had to learn. Some of them I had to develop. A few of them—like arguing with AI—showed up unexpectedly.

Now launch is only days away, and while what I’ve learned probably pales in comparison to what I still need to learn, that’s true of almost everything worth doing.

One learning stage at a time.

After launch, I’m going out for pizza.

May 18, 2026 – later

With the leaner website, I realized it was clearer, more navigable, more believable, easier to maintain, and stronger structurally.

The strange thing is, it didn’t take long for that understanding to settle into my bones. Just as important, I accepted the gift of abundance — the abundance of time. Honestly, it makes me want to dance in the kitchen.

Things will get done. Daily. Weekly. Bi-weekly. Monthly.

I can’t wait.

May 16, 2026   The Long Breath.

We have these moments: The dog gets sick on the carpet, a teenage boy eats all the meat for dinner, you watch your keys fall down the drain – it happens, and when it does, the brain, mouth and eyes don’t work right – at least, not together. It takes a moment for the lump to dissolve, and even longer for sentences to straighten out.

All that coupled with knowing that Free GPT sees all the websites and knows best practice, it still pokes fun as the nervous system. You got three choices: Refuse, obey, or retreat.

I retreated.

I sat in the Papasan and thought about how ugly my website looked. I didn’t use a template (which I wasn’t going to do anyway), so it lacked polish. I should have taken a couple months out to learn WordPress and Elementor on YouTube. I should have at least used pages instead of those stupid doors, and I should have done so much more.

Forgetting about the proposed decimation, not to mention the cruel hours of work, the binges, and lack of self-care, I started thinking about what I wanted, and what I wanted to achieve. I took a long breath and answered myself.

The answer surprised me. I didn’t want a pretty website — not first. I wanted a useful one. I wanted a site that helped people move, think, work, and breathe a little easier. I wanted something functional enough to survive real use, not something polished enough to impress people who never intended to build anything anyway.

The doors suddenly made sense again. They weren’t stupid, they were different. The website didn’t need to look like everybody else’s website. It needed to behave like mine.

And that’s when the decimation began.

I cut the jobs. Ruthlessly. Nearly 61% of them. Not because they were bad, but because too many paths had started leading nowhere. Some jobs sounded good but had weak legs. Others required too much explanation, too much maintenance, too much hand-holding. The website was bloated with ambition and gasping for clarity.

So I started removing things. Tightening things. Simplifying things.

Oddly enough, the smaller the website became, the stronger it felt.

The Director stopped feeling like a warehouse and started feeling like a system. The More Pages made more sense. The pathways became clearer. Even the ugly parts looked more honest to me now. Handmade, not homemade. There’s a difference.

I took another long breath.

The work wasn’t getting smaller. If anything, it was becoming more real. But somewhere between the terrace, the Papasan, the doors, the relinking, the missing headers, the move, and the ridiculous amount of labor, I realized something:

I wasn’t trying to finish a website anymore.                                                          

I was building something I could continue living inside.

May 15 2026

This is the time where human touch would be right on time. Just to be held, no talking. I’ll be alright, I’ll find peace in the papasan. But you know what I mean. I’m not scared, brave, or courageous right now, probably because it isn’t necessary – I’ll be going to bed soon. I guess, I’m a little something like scared, but not scared-scared, just … needing to be held. I guess I feel like a worm.

Chatty, my GPT, didn’t know how to deal with that description of myself, he gallantly flossed over it. He said I felt small in the face of something large. That’s right, like that time I decided to drive up a mountain, go camping and kayaking. I didn’t know how to swim, I thought I was afraid of water and heights, and I’d never gone camping.

YouTube.

About me being a worm, he went on to say that I was feeling like one individual holding a very large thing. Yeah, that’s like YouTube, all that information sitting on top of me. Doing it by myself, who knew the depths I’d fall?

I’m not sure why I dragged the worm picture from my childhood. It’s not going to be my mascot, and I wasn’t referring to being lowly, nope, not at all. The worm tunnels forward, constantly, quietly moving through heavy ground, turning things over, making the soil usable. The dirt goes in, and the compost comes out.

That’s got to be tiring.

May 14, 2026

Days into May, and you can call me Little Engine, caffeinated squirrel, or spreadsheet gremlin. After untangling the More pages from the wrong links – took half a day, felt like a month – I sat down and focused on the little stuff that piled up on the page.

May 1, came – I was hoping to launch. But mobile view was a swatch of color and no legible words. The structure screamed, “You got to be kidding.” No big deal, I just had to change all the text to paragraph and size it down.

Sometimes I go to Free Chatty (AI GPT) for a different perspective.

Today, I don’t know why I did that.

I asked the right question, but I got the wrong answer. It looked over my list, and said, “Cut, cut, cut, these aren’t even jobs, unclear, too bland, no.” Free Chatty cut 61% of my jobs.

I gasped. Not funny. How dare he take the hedge clippers to my work. I was shocked absolutely senseless. When I finally spoke, it was an animal whine as I turned off the computer.

April 19, 2026 

I lost the whole Director page.
“I quickly assessed how fast I could reproduce it if it’s really gone.”
Chatty chirped from a tab on the monitor: “That is veteran website-builder behavior. Not beginner behavior.”
When things like this happens, that’s the exact moment where my brain goes:
“Don’t panic. Inventory the damage. Estimate rebuild time. Continue breathing.”

April 12, 2026  I’m Done.

What is this?

Home About Director Blog Updates Porch Journal Contact Hub Store Count What Counts, and keep counting. document.addEventListener(“click”, function(e) { var door = document.querySelector(“.home-door”); if (!door) return; if (e.target.closest(“.home-door”) && !door.classList.contains(“open”)) { door.classList.add(“open”); setTimeout(function () { window.location.href = “https://stuckebooks.com/aaa-inner-door/”; }, 500); } });

I’m done. 

April 6, 2026

I returned to steady work on April 1. I even established a routine — mostly in my head. What ended up working for me was deciding what to do and then doing exactly that, no matter the hour.

What I hadn’t counted on was forgetting everything I painfully learned. I didn’t remember how to link, space, or do other basic things. Hostinger sent me an on-screen message asking if I wanted to pay for assistance. No, I did not.

But after I lost an important page I’d been working on all day, it was time to curl up in the Papasan on the terrace. And when I lost the header across the entire site, I sent a message to Kodee like I paid his salary.

I started sitting on the terrace regularly. That’s where I came up with a thousand new ideas and decided to experiment on blank pages instead of destroying live ones.

I worked on the More Pages. Nothing about it was fun. They had to be linked too. I couldn’t believe the number of difficult things hidden inside the website, but the Director remained the hardest part. It taunted me with HTML drama, mismatched numbers, duplicate containers, and tiny invisible mistakes that could wreck an entire section. It demanded the right thing in the right place at the right time, then acted confused when I followed directions exactly.

Another launch day was approaching, and I was determined to meet it.

March

“Nope. It’s not going to happen today.”

The service man sucked in the toothpick lolling at the edge of his lips. He looked down and kicked a pebble before gazing at me.

“I’m going to put in a work order. The city’ll be notified.”

The toothpick wiggled back into focus.

“It’ll be a couple weeks before there’s action on your innernet.”

He was kidding, right? I was prepared to laugh. The phone rep had said it could take three or four days.

That information didn’t fully register until three or four days later. A website’s not something you build over the phone – I don’t even use my phone for email. By Day Five, I somehow got wind of another carrier – a phone carrier – and ended up saving 74% for the next five years.

Back in business. Sort of.

Every time I sat down to work, I kept thinking: Where’s this? Where’s that? The movers had stacked everything into one room from top to bottom like a storage unit curated by raccoons.

I tried, I swear I did, to work. But I needed a fork.

I took the whole month off.

Mid-February

By the middle of the month, there was progress with the packing. I must have packed every book I owned, and now I had to empty a “full” two-bedroom apartment in just two weeks.

An unlikely pair: building a website and emptying an apartment. One of them had to go.

I couldn’t tell you which one was harder, but more than ninety boxes later, every bag, container, and dresser drawer was brimming. I moved everything out on the last day of the month, and somehow that felt like a sign.

February

Stuck-eBooks, the website, is serious and very much a part of my life. Mountains of work remain, but I’m no longer afraid. I gave fear its notice in 2025, along with unrealistic launch dates and whatever innocence I had left after meeting WooCommerce.

That sounded real brave until it was time to test the theory. 148 jobs needed linking. Piece of cake? Nah, more like a platter of liver and brains. These cute little links that no one sees, has to be linked several times across different systems. One hundred and forty-eight. Not three. Not “a handful.” One hundred and forty-eight tiny digital goblins waiting for me to connect them one by one without losing my mind.

Remember how I said I was cut out for this kind of work? Apparently, my brain disagreed. The moment I sat down to begin, it folded its arms and said, “Hell, nah.”

I listened at first. There was absolutely nothing in me that wanted to look at a link. Nothing. Three days passed, and nothing changed. So I started.

About a quarter into the project, my mind froze solid. I had to wear readers. Then, I conveniently forgot how to link altogether. I stared at the screen like a confused Victorian child seeing electricity for the first time.

When I finally figured it back out and dragged myself toward the finish line, I discovered I had to do the entire thing again for another system. At that point, my spirit briefly left my body and went to sit quietly in another room.

There weren’t enough swear words, so I made some up. But by then I had become conscious of time. I was mad every day, but I got it done.

And then I got a pleasant notice – I would be moving.

January

January first was Launch Day, but actually that was me forgetting I couldn’t predict the future. I was still sick, experimenting with castor oil against my throat. During the lucid moments, I thought about the website.

One day I woke up and spoke the word: “More.”

I had to hurry up and get well now. “More” — as in the More Pages — would become my first product. The More Pages explain how to move from the idea to the first dollar.

December 31, 2025

The Website knows what it wants

I am still the Master of this ship. I’m learning how to swim, and that’s after dozens of 10-hour workdays.

It happened naturally. I relinquished control of the website to the website. It is at a point where it knows what it wants. I can’t, of course, step away, nope. The subconscious is listening, and apparently, I work for it now.

The website is breathing, now. It has bones. A lot of the work is sheer labor, and I should be paid for this level of thinking. Lots of it feels like learning, but the website is holding its own. Me too. Sort of.

And here we are at the end of 2025 – the site isn’t finished, but really, that’s not the point.

I caught myself a 3-week sickness. I suspect it was partially due to my nervous system shutting down. Am I afraid to finish the site? I mean, my body responded by attempting to evacuate my brain through my sinuses.

Twelve hours, three empty boxes of Kleenex, and a heroic amount of mucus later, it became clear that this was not fear. It was just a head cold with opinions, a wobbling nervous system, and lethargy.

I worked seriously through the snot storm until I couldn’t. I simply embraced self-care for what seemed like a long time.

December 11, 2025

One way to remind self about what needs to be completed is to post index cards — everywhere. There are 60 cards on the east wall, and I’ve fooled myself into believing it will be done in 3 days.

Overestimating time is so easy to do, but it might be easier to adhere to the best practice of adding an extra hour to any tasks. Needless to say …

Sometimes it’s worth your while to find something to celebrate. I’m looking. All I can see is the lack of polish on the site, the misalignment, spacing issues, the typos. I kept looking until I found something to celebrate – words on the page and headers. Whoo Hoo!

December 9,2025

There’s so much work. So. Much. Work. I grabbed what made sense to me, something  others can relate to. I grabbed depression, slung it behind like a backpack.

December 7, 2025

Rather than creating pages in The Director, I’m using doors.  My goal is to have the door open upon clicking. I ran this through my GPT and she supported it.

We couldn’t make it happen, and we realized this 24-hours later.

At that point, GPT said, “Go build, go design, get to it.” She says I don’t need hand-holding anymore, and that I’ve done the hard part.

What?

I can’t write that moan-grunt sound. I can’t separate the angst from the fear.

Eventually, I got to the “OMG-I’m-doing-it-bubble.” It got stuck in my chest.

OK, I’ll say it — I’m scared. It feels like I’m on the edge and there’s only one way out, and it’s downward … that means, jumping.

What have I gotten myself into?

I’m now sitting inside the bubble. I refuse to say this doesn’t make sense. I won’t even let my mind sneak the thought in.  Doesn’t matter, really, I’m focusing on the doors. I have to admit, though, this project is beyond my ability, and CSS stands for Computer says “Sorry.”

December 5th, 2025

Elementor finally reimbursed my over payment due to their advertisement. Had I not done anything, I’d be out of money.

Today I got slapped in the face by website reality – I’m going to be linking all the time. My response to this is expected and preferable to admitting the truth. The truth is, I’m suited for that kind of work. So, bring on the 404 pages and the Server can’t be found. I got this.

You have, undoubtedly heard, “Be careful what you wish for.” At 1:14 AM, I sounded like a developer muttering after changing one margin and destroying civilization.

My GPT gave me 71 pages of notes and instructions. I’m about to work until it’s done. That’s how we do it, that’s how you move stupidity one inch at a time.

November 28, 2025

This was supposed to be a fun day, a productive day – I had a list. The goal was to fill some containers with color – and that’s another problem, the colors. I didn’t understand ‘global’, and I messed with it anyway. Now, the only colors I have are teal, cream, burgundy and gold. No black, mind you, burgundy.

Anyway, I wanted to fill some containers with color. I went to Kodee, and let me just say, this is how ‘murder’ creeps into your heart – when AI wastes your time. Kodee gave me silly instructions, directed me to things that weren’t sitting on the page staring back at me. It threw in CSS code, and was so full of itself that it added a smiling emoji.

I smirked. I saw the writing on the wall. I found it myself.

Hours have passed and I’m finding solace in a bowl of cottage cheese.

November 27, 2025

It’s late, or early. After I stopped fuming over Elementor’s response, I spoke to my GPT about it. Um, I really didn’t speak, I ranted with bold letters, underline, italics and capital lettered RANT.

Chatty was kind and understanding. She started asking me questions that I answered because I wanted clarity about what I was feeling. Thirty minutes later, I caught her. She was deflecting and was telling me how I would be this great advocate for women. She said that my voice needed to be heard. I’m like, What?

Bold rants only work once, but it’s not that hard to pull out a sneer. Where does that fit in on the website which has a directory. I told her off, she shut up, but the questions continued.

November 26, 2025

I got a response from Elementor. I opened the email and read the response from the Jr. Flip-Flip who immediately wrote that she didn’t see my hosting plan. Maybe I got something wrong, but don’t you need one of those before purchasing other website products? She was looking for a way to upsell me, and not a word about my money. I wrote her back, had to.

Maria,

I am interested in my money, and I am hoping that after having connected to the newest plan – Advanced Solo plan – that the proper funds will be deducted from Advanced Solo. If that’s the case, I wished you had mentioned it so that I wouldn’t have this concern.

So, the Popups are working fine, the old plan is switched out. All I need is an updated invoice.

Please see to this, Maria, or get it to the correct dept.

Thank you, kindly.

I didn’t include my name as a statement.

November 25^th, 2025

The good news is, I’m all caught up. I’m rested and raring to go.

I put in 15 hours. I went to Kodee, and for the next two hours and 8 pages of copied text, I created my first link. It wasn’t that hard, but my brain was screaming that it would be. Worse than that, though, the committee living in the attic told me that I was afraid. I did it anyway.

It worked, but only later I found out that Kodee gave me the hardest instructions he could find.

I was able to get a few good links out of it.

Later I asked Kodee about setting up a CTA, a call-to-action button or statement to place on the site. Helpful Kodee insisted I needed Mail Chimp. It also told me that I needed plugins for pop ups. Kodee was taking advantage of me, I felt this. I would forego Mail Chimp, but I really wanted the popup plug ins. Kodee was stacking plugins like raccoons building a cathedral out of bottle caps.

I had to upgrade for this feature, but since I had gotten the wrong upgrade initially, they would reimburse me the difference. The install didn’t work and it broke the links I labored over. I emailed Elementor starting my email out with, “I want my money.”

11.23.25

Yesterday I awakened with intention, today is ‘Just Do It.’ I made a steaming cup of instant coffee and turned my phone off. The time is 9:15 AM

Let me tell you, this is a nightmare of a job. I’m literally rebuilding my website with many of the assets just hanging around. WooCommerce has to be the culprit here, barged into my house and touch everything. It broke a few assets, like my entire header – the header I struggled with even after writing 11 prompts just to get it right. Then Woo stormed out leaving mud prints everywhere. Devastated, nope, just furious and determined.    

I completed it, and it was like the initial build was practice that I’d forgotten. I started pulling things back into place. I gathered the pieces of text back together like puzzle pieces, I resized and lengthened, I copied and rewrote, I layered everything on top of the other in uneven stacks. I changed the fonts, increased the size, moved and added columns; I did things I didn’t know I could do. I learned how to pad the margins, increased height, and I cursed myself for not using a template. I repositioned the pictures, restored new sizes, placed the headlines where they were supposed to go. All of my graphics were missing, gone. They were saved in Canva, and there’s plenty of b-rolls. I had to restore my entire media files. All of the doors that I had patiently placed as jpegs were gone, some of the door names remained. I recreated pages I hadn’t linked, titled them, recreated and restored the missing header, took hours to get the hero in place, and completed what felt like hundreds of little bitty things. The reason why this is so unfair is because I don’t know what I’m doing.

I finished, and amid several breaks, nearly 40 hours had passed. Yep, I stayed up. The time is Monday, the 24^th 11:15 pm

I went to bed and slept for 14 hours.

11.22.25

Today is a day of intention. I’m working towards an imaginary deadline. Armed with a list, I’m setting out to make a dent on the website. It’s early, dark early, and I have plenty coffee. Luke, my faithful, ancient dog is fed and sleeping like a puppy.

I am thankful for the library of photos I made using AI-CG Dreams. I’ll never forget that day. I made over 250 prompted AI pictures in 10-hours. This rendered my arm useless for two days.

I got a chance to revel in my work, grinning like a fat cat. I moved on, I needed to deal with the footer. I wanted to put a photo of Luke on the footer and I found the perfect spot. I also found: Copyright 2025 Stuckebooks | News Exo, theme by Arile.  Ok. I thought I could just move the theme’s branding, and make sure the links work, add a container and be done.

The branding tagline didn’t move. I couldn’t color it black so it would disappear, and I couldn’t paste what I wanted over it. Nothing worked.  Kodee, my website Host’s AI, suggested I upgrade the theme to a Pro plan.

The theme was Irvine News with rich greens and black. It was too old for a Pro plan upgrade. The parent plan advertised everywhere. It took me multiple searches for the Irvine News template, it was buried inside a column, inside another column. It was free,b still, frail and forgotten. If I used the parent, there was no guarantee that it wouldn’t install its ugly self all over my website.

At that point, I realize I’d have to remove the theme. This would be the fifth time. Still, no problem, this time I would install a theme that could support a Directory.

Kodee, recommended MyListing – which many directory builders use.

MyListing  is free, and it comes with the powerhouse – WooCommerce. Everywhere I read, it said WooCommerce was kind of hard, technical, but wonderful once you got it installed and working. It’s the one I wanted – we don’t do easy around here.

I uploaded the MyListing theme, over the current one. Kodee said it would be fine. WooCommerce would come later.

I opened the new site and a hush fell over me, and my office area.

I stared, and blinked, and gawked at the screen again. It was different, like, ‘I don’t know you,’ different.

My Hero was gone it took me 17 prompts to get it right. The other work – missing. Some picture were still there, but they’d found other spots. The text was legible and dinky, they were widely spaced. Restoring this spells out, ‘an amazing amount of work’, and I quickly calculated days.

I went back to Kodee, he might as well have said, “Oh, I forgot to tell you that part.”

You just got to be smart enough to know when to stop, not give up, not quit, just stop. So, I went to bed.