The Admin Panel I Didn’t Need
I was sitting with Mary, talking about publishing more. My first thought was the obvious one: I need an admin panel.
I could already see it. An editor, a login, drafts, image uploads, a nice publish button. It would feel finished.
It would also be a pile of fields, buttons, and permissions I'd have to build and keep working, and none of it had anything to do with what I wanted. I didn't want publishing software. I wanted a quick way to turn a thought into a post.
Then it hit me that I could just talk to my agent.
Conversation is the interface
I usually start with something small: a thing I noticed, a question, a moment I don't want to forget. I can tell my agent about it the way I'd tell a friend. It helps with the structure, pushes back on the weak parts, and formats the post how the site needs it. I read it, change what's wrong, and publish.
That conversation is my CMS.
Admin panels aren't useless. If you've got a team, you probably want roles, approvals, scheduling, and an image library. Those solve real problems.
But this is my personal site and I'm the only author. Building a control room for a one-person workflow would've been solving the wrong problem.
Build for what you already do
This goes beyond blogging. Don't start with the software you could build. Start with what you already do.
I think, I talk, I check it, I share it. So my publishing setup should stay out of the way of that.
Now instead of maintaining an admin panel, I get more time for building things and for the kind of conversations I had with Mary that day, which is where this post came from.