BradCooke.com Becomes a Publishing Platform
Moving from building a website to building a metadata-driven publishing platform.
Tags: Abbey Root • BradCooke.com • Astro • Publishing • Metadata
BradCooke.com Becomes a Publishing Platform
Today’s session felt like one of the biggest milestones since Abbey Root began.
For the past several sessions I’ve been building the foundation of BradCooke.com. The goal wasn’t to create a finished website—it was to build a platform that would make publishing easy for years to come.
Today it finally started to feel like that platform exists.
Major Accomplishments
Today we completed several pieces of the publishing architecture:
- Added dynamic project collections.
- Added reusable Astro components.
- Built dynamic project pages.
- Created the first two real project pages.
- Added a Journal section.
- Added metadata-driven content collections.
- Improved the developer toolkit.
- Continued standardizing project documentation.
More importantly, all of these pieces now work together instead of existing as separate experiments.
The Philosophy Became Clear
One realization kept appearing throughout the day.
Rather than maintaining information in multiple places, the project should describe something once and generate everything else.
That philosophy now exists throughout Abbey Root.
Examples include:
- Ansible inventory generating documentation.
- Tool metadata generating command help.
- Project metadata generating website pages.
- Markdown content generating navigation.
- Content collections generating indexes.
The same pattern continues to appear because it keeps reducing duplicated work.
AI as a Collaborator
One of the more interesting conversations today wasn’t about code.
It was about AI.
My goal isn’t to have AI replace creativity.
Instead, I want AI to help organize ideas, eliminate repetitive work, identify patterns, and preserve context between work sessions.
The writing, personality, humor, and stories should still sound like me.
AI should help me finish more work, not replace the reason I’m doing the work in the first place.
Looking Ahead
The focus of BradCooke.com is beginning to change.
Instead of spending every session building infrastructure, I can begin spending more time creating content.
The platform is becoming mature enough that new projects should mostly consist of adding Markdown, improving components when patterns emerge, and documenting what I’m building.
That feels like a much more sustainable way to grow the site.
Closing Thoughts
Abbey Root started as a Linux lab.
Today it feels more like an ecosystem.
The infrastructure, documentation, developer toolkit, website, and future AI platform are all beginning to reinforce one another.
The project still has a long way to go, but today was one of those days where the overall direction became much clearer.
One sentence seemed to summarize the entire session:
Describe it once. Generate everything else.