Series

A running record of what changed on johnmcdougal.com and why: the automation, the rendering features, and the structure behind the site.

Projects:This Site

1. Part 1How The Site Started Validating Itself Before I Can Commit It
2. Part 2Mermaid Diagrams in Astro with Local Bundling
3. Part 3Series, Graph, and Mermaid Updates

A practical series on context, iteration, prompts, reusable workflows, and human judgment in AI-assisted work.

1. Part 1The Latent Space: The mental model that changed how I work with AI
2. Part 2Context is the Interface
3. Part 3Iteration as Method
4. Part 4The Prompt is a Draft
5. Part 5Systems That Build Systems
6. Part 6The IT Guy Who Listens

How this Astro site, its analytics, and its custom-domain email infrastructure were built and hardened.

Projects:This Site

1. Part 1How I Built johnmcdougal.com with Claude and Astro
2. Part 2Custom Email Routing with Cloudflare and SMTP2Go
3. Part 3Setting Up PostHog Analytics on a Static Site (and Fixing What the Wizard Broke)
4. Part 4SPF, DKIM, and DMARC: the full lockdown after setting up custom email
5. Part 5Do your parked domains need email authentication? Yes -- and it's four records.
6. Part 6How I read DMARC reports without reading DMARC reports