When I started my career in marketing, the very first company for which I worked was unique in that the two retail websites they operated, TacticalGear.com and WorkBoots.com, were not managed through a content management system (CMS). Rather, both sites were entirely coded from the ground up and managed by a very talented team of developers.
This anachronism was a result of the company having been founded back in 2004. They never modernized — they simply kept running their sites with their own custom-written source code (a fact that had both its advantages and disadvantages).
I was fascinated. I wrote product pages and blog pages for each site that were published by a team of designers who were fluent in the sites' code. But, as my tenure there moved along, I started to get a peek behind the curtain. The coding language and structure were simply magical to me. All those funny symbols under the hood breathed life into the very sites that paid my bills and allowed my wife and I to pay for our wedding and buy our first house. All of the things we do online — scrolling through social media, buying necessities (and not so necessary things), paying bills, sending important messages — all of it is propped up by code that, up until that point, I hadn’t thought about too often.
Since that job, I’ve had the opportunity to work on a number of fantastic websites: bwpackaging.com, hy-c.com, the entire suite of Signature Cruise Experiences’s websites, idwatchdog.com, and, most recently, combswaterkotte.com (for Hexxen marketing agency). Despite how much I’ve enjoyed working on these sites (and with the people who grow and maintain them), they all have one thing in common: They were already built by the time I got to them. I was simply adding to them.
All of these websites are robust and authoritative in their own right, which made me wonder: What was it like when they started? How did they define the structure of each page? What decisions led them to the development of their CSS style sheets and the way those sheets are integrated into their HTML? I had to find out for myself.
Luckily, I bought my own domain name (louisgreubel.com) around late 2019 at the prompting of Cat5 Commerce’s marketing director, Matt Westby, a mensch of a man who schooled me in the fundamentals of SEO and web design. All of that led me here: to this site you're on now.
Previously, I used this domain as a marketing portfolio suite through Squarespace, a popular web building and hosting service. But Squarespace doesn’t require any coding knowledge. And to be fair, that’s its appeal: It serves as a great tool for people who want to run and manage a website but don’t know (or want to know) how to code. Up until a few years ago, that was me.
But as I’ve developed my coding skills, I wanted to know what it was like to build a site from the ground up. And so I have. And that’s where you are right now if you’re reading this. The question, though, was, “What am I going to use this thing for?”
In my current position, I write all day, at least 5,000 words a day. And that’s a conservative estimate — a very conservative estimate which, multiplied out over an entire 250-day work year, means I write well over 1 million words per year. That's a lot.
But why not write more? That's what I've decided to do.
On this website, you’ll find my blog, marginalia. "Marginalia" is a fun little word I discovered that refers to notes or embellishments written in the margin of a book. It’s the perfect word to describe my blog, as it consists of posts I’ve developed out of scraps of ideas written in the modern, digital version of a book’s margin: my phone’s notes app.
You’ll also find poetry here. I’m not the best poet; I leave that skill to my wife, alongside whom I earned my bachelor’s degree in English from St. Louis University, which is where we met (side note: I proposed to my wife on SLU's campus in the exact spot where I first told her I loved her, if you’re inclined to a saccharine little anecdote). She writes the poems in our house while I stick to the prose. Still, you have to practice to get better, right?
So, that’s what this site is. Poke around and enjoy it. It’s nothing particularly special — just the musings of an average, lifelong midwesterner looking to fill his free time, practice his coding, and get a little better at writing poetry (hopefully).
Oh, and if you’re reading this, you know me, and we haven’t heard from each other in a while, get in touch. Life’s too short and the world’s too small to spend it with deafening walls of silence between us.
There you are: 800+ words about what this site is and why I built it. That’s a lot, but I’m a busy guy, and as Blaise Pascal once said, “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.”
