workflow on jwogrady

Evidence Storytelling

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 11:00:00 -0500

If you run a business and you have ever thought we should really be writing about this, and then not written about it for eight months —

this one’s for you. I’ve been you. I’m partly still you.

Here’s the thing I want to put a name to, because we built it this week and it works: Evidence Storytelling.

The problem, stated plainly

Every business is told to produce content. Every business owner knows why they don’t.

Four releases for the person before the business had one

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 10:45:00 -0500

If you have ever gone back to something you wrote a few weeks ago about your own plan, and found it describing a plan you no longer have —

yes. That one. Let’s talk about that.

What I would have told you yesterday

I have two Hugo themes. A theme, if you haven’t met one, is the design layer: it decides what a page looks like and leaves the writing alone.

A screenshot tool for a machine with no screenshot tool

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 18:58:00 -0500

Sixteen entries in and not one of them has shown anything. Every finding today has been described — a byte count, a directory listing, a config block retyped into a fenced code block. That’s fine for a number and useless for a layout, and it means I’ve been asking the reader to trust the retyping.

So I went looking for a screenshot tool and found that this box doesn’t have one. Not chromium, not playwright, not imagemagick, not scrot, not even Pillow. WSL here is a compiler and a text editor’s remote end, and nothing else.

Four editor defaults that are right for code and wrong for prose

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 16:33:00 -0500

Zed’s defaults are tuned for code, which is the right call and leaves four of them wrong for what I’m actually doing in here.

Autosave, for reasons recorded an entry ago and not worth reliving.

Soft wrap to editor_width — markdown has no line length, and a horizontal scrollbar inside a paragraph is a problem I inflicted on myself.

The third one is the one I’d never have guessed. Turn trailing-whitespace stripping off for markdown. Two trailing spaces is a hard line break; strip them on save and the editor silently rewrites your text, and the diff shows nothing wrong because whitespace is invisible. A formatter that is correct for every other filetype quietly corrupts this one.

The image was fine. The page had nowhere to be.

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 16:05:00 -0500

Two things were true at once and I couldn’t make them fit together.

The build was publishing my image to public/. The build was not publishing public/first-try/index.html.

I assumed one of those had to be a lie, and spent a while looking for which. Neither was. The asset pipeline and the page renderer don’t know about each other — a shortcode calling resources.Get emits its image whether or not any page renders successfully. So the image being served proved the shortcode worked and proved precisely nothing about the page.

Day one: the stack, and why each piece earns its place

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 15:40:00 -0500

I’m writing this one before I’ve built anything, which is deliberate. The things that are about to cost me an hour will be obvious and unmemorable in a week, and obvious-and-unmemorable is exactly the knowledge I keep having to buy twice.

So: notes while I’m inside it, not a tidy retrospective afterwards.

The stack

Hugo, because the build is one binary. No Node toolchain underneath it, nothing to npm install, nothing to rot in six months when I come back to this.