Five years ago, when we moved into our Hackney house I collected a bunch of homeware retailers, furniture designers, suppliers and so on. They ended up in an Airtable, kinda useful. But not visually useful.

Now, I’ve made a dedicated listing site for homeware. www.inventory.house

I’d been kicking around the idea of Inventory Supplies for a few years, a website to list beautiful and useful products that you carry. It seemed like a no brainer to get the TLD for homeware – a dot house.

I’m using exactly the same layout as the partner site, the only addition is a natural-colour filter in the menu to allow for cool vs bright colour filtering. I ran into the eternal WordPress dead ends when trying to sync the block/in-browser theme I’d made over at the .supplies site. Perhaps that feature will improve over time, but for now it seems to bind some of your customisations to the database. Which makes for a half baked export of a theme. Oh well, it was an experiment of a frontier feature from them, I’d expected it not to do all the things I’d need.

Now I’m using LLMs for code, it seems more interesting to revert back to a full custom theme for a side project I only dabble in now and then. My issue was always that switching my brain back to old projects was tricky, I’d spend more time calibrating what was going on than coding after taking time off. Likely that will be less of an issue with a integrated development environment (IDE).

And here they are, side by side.

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Up next: I want to focus the majority of my time populating the sites, this side project has suffered the hand of yak-shaving for many a while, getting the content built up is the most useful thing to think about.

The rest of the time I’m gunna ruminate on the directory aspect of both sites, this is where the retailers, suppliers, manufactures and designers are listed. I want to avoid the common patterns of logo parades, opengraph previews, screenshots of websites that go outdated quickly. Likely a useful task for an agent to help build the dataset up and my bet right now is a functional table data feature is best.

When the Yak needs shaving: I’ll create a theme that can easily distribute to both sites or go bonkers and sack off WordPress for the project and see if I can learn a bit of Ruby with help from an agent or two.