The Custom Systems Handbook

I built this handbook so the systems running underneath my website would make sense to anyone, with or without a technical background. The site is not just a set of pages. It is a machine that takes everything I make, the films, the people, the press, the photographs, the writing, and makes it findable wherever someone goes looking, whether that someone is a person on Google, a voice assistant, or an AI like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Gemini.

The handbook walks through the whole thing in plain language. It covers the surfaces of search the site speaks to at once, the machine-readable layer that lets a search engine or an AI read a page without guessing, the tools that quietly write and improve each listing, and the feedback loop that checks whether the AI assistants are citing the work.

One idea matters more than the rest. Most websites are built only for human eyes. This one is built for humans and machines both, and every page publishes a second, machine-readable version of itself. That single decision is what turns a website into something the whole internet can understand.