Bespoke Creator Operations
How I built a creator OS in an afternoon, and why two Wikipedia bots have been arguing over the same page for longer than some marriages.
Welcome to Dispatches from the Deep End.
In this issue:
💾 The Software In Your Head.
😠 The Oldest Arguments on the Internet
🗨️ The Spinner Rack at the Piggly Wiggly
Three stories this week, about small software doing quiet work in the background of modern life and a glimpse back at the spinner rack.
The future is bespoke softward. The past a memory of what’s possible again.
Grab coffee.
Let’s fuckin’ goooo!!!!
💾 The Software In Your Head.
The email came back within a day. The guy who built the tool wanted to know why I cancelled, so I wrote him an honest review.
The features were fine. The price, for what the thing actually did, was the kind of number that only makes sense if you squint at your own budget the way a gambler squints at a losing hand.
I told him so. Polite, specific, no cheap shots. Hit send, closed the tab, made a second coffee.
And somewhere between the first sip and the second a quiet little thought crawled up the back of my skull and sat down.
I could probably just build this thing myself.
So I did.
It took about two hours. First version was absolute shit. A haunted spreadsheet with pretensions, held together with copy-paste and hope and the kind of stubborn ignorance that only a writer brings to a code editor.
It ran on my machine. It cost nothing. Nobody could cancel it, price-hike it, pivot it, or get acquired and turned into a dashboard for somebody else’s quarterly report.
I kept nudging it. The shit version quietly accreted into a private, bespoke operating system for running my whole creative shop. A thing that exists because I needed it to exist and for no other reason in the world.
I’ve been calling these things micro-apps because I had to call them something.
The operative word is micro. Small enough to live in one directory. Small enough to run on a five-dollar shared host or off a thumb drive you keep in your pocket. Portable. Self-contained. Yours.
One HTML file, or a small folder of them. Runs in your browser. No account, no signup, no server phoning home to some data broker in Delaware about every button you press. If there’s a database, it’s a little file sitting next to the HTML, not a service humming in somebody else’s data center.
You open the file, use the tool, close the tab. Whatever data it touched stays on your machine or stops existing the second you walk away.
Concrete example. I built a Gumroad fee calculator. Paste in a sale price, set an affiliate cut if you’ve got one, and it tells you what Gumroad keeps and what you keep.
Big dark card. Number glowing at the bottom like a panel readout on a salvaged spaceship. That’s the whole product.
It lives at a URL. Weighs less than a single photograph off your phone. Will still work in a browser built ten years from now because HTML from 1996 still runs today.
Go use it right now at ops.nicheof.one. Costs you nothing. Doesn’t want your email. Doesn’t care who you are.
The math is where it broke me open.
Hosting. A static file costs effectively nothing to host. Shared cPanel runs three to ten bucks a month and you can park hundreds of these on one account.
I sell hosting in this bracket myself, for what it’s worth. Four bucks a month, shared cPanel, the same setup I run every tool at ops.nicheof.one on. Unless you’ve got hundreds of people hammering your micro-apps at the same time every day, that tier is all you’ll ever need. Shared hosting is a solved problem. It just works, and when it stops working you move the files somewhere else because they’re just files.
Netlify and Cloudflare Pages host them for free if you’d rather go that route. A thumb drive costs less than lunch and works on any machine you plug it into.
No server process to keep breathing. No API throttling to grovel past. You upload the file once and it sits there the way a book sits on a shelf.
What used to demand a developer, a sprint cycle, and a project manager with a Jira addiction now takes one person and an afternoon.
I do not know how to code in any serious sense. I have a rudimentary grasp of the syntax and a better grasp of what a working tool feels like from the user side. What I have that matters is the ability to describe in plain English what I want the software to do. That turns out to be the whole job now.
You sit down with an AI, describe the problem, iterate. You watch the thing take shape the way a photograph develops in a tray of chemicals.
Writers may have an edge here. Coders built careers on a specialized dialect. Describing problems clearly in the mother tongue is the job the rest of us have been practicing our entire lives.
And if the tool itself needs AI to do its job, the user brings their own key. The micro-app calls the API straight from the browser with whichever model the user wants to pay for. DeepSeek is the one I point people toward because it’s cheap enough that a personal tool costs pennies a month to run. The tool stays yours. The intelligence is metered by the token, paid directly to whoever runs the model, no middleman skimming a subscription fee on top.
The SaaS model demands your email address before it lets you see the product work. That’s why the acquisition funnel exists.
Landing page, signup form, verification email, onboarding sequence, free trial ending on a credit card. A whole grinding intestine of modern marketing, built to digest a stranger into a paying customer because the product cannot sell itself on first contact.
A micro-app has none of that apparatus. You click a link, you’re inside the tool, you’re already using it.
One link in a newsletter can outrun a month of paid acquisition, because nothing stands between the reader and the thing that helps them.
Trust. This is the one I sit with longest.
SaaS demands trust before it delivers value. Give us your card, give us your email, give us permission to live in your inbox forever, and in return we’ll maybe let you see if the thing works for you.
A micro-app flips that whole transaction on its head. It delivers the value first.
If you liked what it did, you can come back. If you want to toss a few bucks at the work, there’s a link on the page. You were never asked to trust anything except your own judgment about whether the tool earned its keep.
SaaS tools die.
Servers get shut down. Companies pivot. Founders burn out. Acquirers kill the product. Pricing pages triple overnight and you’re exporting to CSV at two in the morning wondering how long your last working export will hold.
A micro-app built in 2025 will still run in 2035 because the web platform is aggressively backwards compatible. HTML from the Clinton administration still loads. Your file does not rot on the shelf.
The only way it dies is if you delete it.
Maybe you’re already drafting the reply that starts with but I’m not technical enough for any of this.
Technical skill is no longer the gate.
You need to understand your own problem well enough to describe it to a machine in sentences a friend would understand. That’s the whole job now.
If you’ve been running a business, a craft, a household, a creative practice, you already know where the friction is. You already know what you wish existed.
That knowledge used to be worth nothing without a developer. Now it’s all that matters. The building part has gotten so cheap it barely registers as work anymore, and that’s a sentence I did not expect to write this decade.
The subscription economy is rent extraction dressed in a clean interface and a friendly welcome email.
They charge what the market will bear until the market stops bearing it. Then they pivot to the next crop of suckers. Fine. Let them have their whole rotten machine.
Meanwhile some of us are quietly assembling small portable tools on our own hard drives, giving them away, and watching them compound into something that might one day fit on a thumb drive.
A whole creator operating system in your pocket, running when the wifi dies, still there when the servers go dark, holding the line through whatever strange weather is coming.
I’ll show you the next one when it ships. The door’s open and the light’s on.
😠 The Oldest Arguments on the Internet
The first time I noticed, I was up at an hour I shouldn’t have been awake, reading the edit history of a Wikipedia article I wouldn’t admit to looking up.
Two bots were trading the same small correction back and forth. A new move every few months. Sometimes a year between volleys. The timestamps spread across the page like the fossil record of an argument nobody was having on purpose.
I sat there with my coffee going cold and tried to do the math on how long this particular quarrel had been running. The answer was longer than my last relationship.
Wikipedia has bots.
Small automated scripts written by volunteers to do the jobs no human has the patience for. They check spelling, fix broken links, revert vandalism, tag copyright problems, clean up after themselves and each other.
Thousands of them run at any given moment. They account for a fraction of a percent of all editors but perform anywhere from 10 to 50 percent of the edits. The bots are the invisible janitors of collective human knowledge, mopping up after everyone and nobody in some grand unspoken pact nobody paid for and nobody can cancel.
Sometimes two bots disagree. One was told to format citations one way. The other was told to format them another way. Neither knows the other exists. Neither has any concept of winning. They just do what they were programmed to do, forever, like insects patrolling opposite sides of the same leaf.
Researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute looked at ten years of this and found something strange about the rhythm. Humans revert each other in minutes. They see a change, they get mad, they fix it, they move on. Bots do not work that way. A bot makes its first counter-move about a month after the initial edit. A month. Then it waits again. Then another month.
It’s the slowest fucking argument on Earth, and it’s been running longer than some of the people reading this sentence.
Pervez Musharraf. Niels Bohr. Schwarzenegger. These are some of the most bot-contested pages in the history of the encyclopedia. Two or three scripts disagreeing about a middle initial or a date or whether a word should be italicized, with a month between each move, for the better part of a decade.
This is the part I keep coming back to.
None of these bots know they are in a fight. None of them are suffering. None of them will ever look back and wonder if it was worth it. They do not sleep and they do not hold grudges because they cannot hold anything. They are just loops. Small loops running inside a bigger loop, and the bigger loop is us.
A pair of bots fighting over Schwarzenegger’s page has been doing it since before your kid was born, probably, and will probably still be doing it when you are dead. Someone made these things and then forgot about them. The creators moved on, got jobs, got married, had kids, maybe themselves got divorced. Meanwhile their small dumb children kept undoing each other in the dark.
There is a counter-narrative to all this that I want to mention for honesty’s sake. Some researchers at Berkeley and Wikimedia went back and looked at the same data and said most of the fights are not fights at all. They’re maintenance cycles. One bot moves a link and another bot updates the location and it looks like conflict from the outside, but it’s actually collaboration happening at a rhythm too slow for us to read as collaboration.
A duet we mistook for a duel.
I almost prefer the fight version, because at least a fight has a shape. A duet slowed down to geological time is a kind of machine prayer, repeating itself in the basement of the encyclopedia, with nobody listening and nobody meant to.
Either way. Somewhere underneath the most visited reference on Earth, small programs are having the longest conversations in human history.
Slower than weather. Faster than nothing. Months pass between their turns. The humans who made them are off living the rest of their lives, and the bots keep at it, patient as rust.
If you want to see it for yourself, open any Wikipedia article and click View history. Scroll back far enough. Look at who the editors are. Some of them have bot at the end of their name. Those ones have been there longer than you have, in a sense, because they never got tired.
They are still at it tonight.
🗨️ The Spinner Rack at the Piggly Wiggly
Waverly Plaza. Tennessee. Red and white sign with the giant smiling pig anchoring the corner of the only real shopping center our town had.
The place smelled of produce going soft in the humidity and piped-in muzak that had been piped in so long it no longer counted as music. More like ambient weather. You didn’t hear it, you aged inside of it.
The manager’s office was a big block in the middle of the store. Behind it, along the back wall, the magazine rack. In front of the magazine rack… the spinner.
A foot taller than I was at the age I remember best. I walked to it like a pilgrim every time we came for groceries.
Twenty bucks in chore money bought about twenty-five comics off that rack. X-Men. Whatever Vertigo I could get my hands on. Anything else with a good cover. It was a lot of the rack.
Thrasher got me bad. I was a wannabe skater in a town with no good skaters and no good places to skate, but the vibe of that magazine hit the right nerve. The mail-order ads in the back pages felt like transmissions from a planet with better weather. I read them the way some kids read the Bible.
Later, when I had a license, the same Piggly Wiggly would sell me a fifteen-dollar carton of Marlboros because I told them the cigarettes were for my dad.
They knew. I knew they knew. Nobody said anything. It was a different time, which is a phrase people use to excuse worse things than underage cigarettes, but in this case it just means what it says. The clerk was tired. The line was long. The pig was smiling.
The plaza itself was where we learned to be teenagers. Cigarettes in the parking lot. Hacky sack when nothing else was happening. Skateboards until the asphalt ate our knees or we found somewhere to get drunk.
All of it anchored by that store. All of it orbiting the pig.
That Piggly Wiggly is gone now.
The building is still a grocery store, locally owned by someone I went to school with, so in that sense it survived. But it’s one of the last of its kind in that county.
The big box supercenters came in and ate the landscape the way a fungus eats a fallen tree. Not fast. Just steady. One locally owned anchor at a time, swallowed into a parking lot the size of a runway, lit by the kind of fluorescent that makes everyone look like they’re recovering from something.
The spinner rack died first, years before the store changed hands. The magazine stand followed.
The comic industry that fed them is dying now in a slower way, on a longer timeline, chewed up by streaming and social feeds and YouTube essay channels and a dozen other things that serve the same hunger with less friction.
You can still buy a single issue of X-Men if you work at it. You can still subscribe to Thrasher if you know where to look. But nobody stumbles into them at a foot above eye level in the back of a grocery store on a Saturday morning, because the grocery store is forty minutes away now and owned by a company in Arkansas and the rack where the comics used to live is a display of phone chargers and lottery scratch-offs.
Small towns are not built the way they used to be built.
The anchors are gone. The places where a kid could walk in and discover what they were going to love are gone, or going.
What replaced them is larger, cheaper, better lit, and somehow emptier. You can buy anything at the supercenter. You just cannot find anything there the way you used to find things at the Piggly Wiggly, because finding something requires a store small enough to hold your attention and a shelf that rewards a foot taller than you.
I want to be careful here because nostalgia is a trap.
Anyone who tells you things were simpler then is either lying or hasn’t thought about it long enough. Things were never simple.
We just lived inside our towns instead of being merely present in them, and the difference was a spinner rack you could turn with your hand and a magazine whose ads you could tear out and mail to an address in California.
The thing that’s gone isn’t the simplicity. The thing that’s gone is the ground floor where the weird kids found out what they were going to love.
A spinner rack in the back of a grocery store was a cheap accidental curriculum nobody was paying attention to, and it taught a generation of us what we were. There is no replacement for it. There was never meant to be.
The pig is still smiling somewhere. Just not at me.
If you made it here, that means you should…
That’s it for this week. Don’t let your dongles dangle. Until next time…
~ J.D.
P.S. I’ve made about $21K in the last 6 months. Here’s how…
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The Wikipedia thing is crazy. I had no idea that was going on.
Great read, as always!
A lot to be said about just doing the thing yourself. These days, it feels a little too much like work, but I do want to get back into making my own stuff...I'm up to my eyeballs in the tech environment most of the time, and at the end of the day, sometimes I just want to stare at grass.
Piggly Wiggly brings back memories...that and Bi-Lo.