Building a Lightweight CMS from Parts

I don’t need a full CMS. I need a publishing workflow that stays out of my way. The Problem with Traditional CMS WordPress, Ghost, and their cousins all share the same assumption: your content lives in a database, and the CMS controls access to it. That means servers, logins, attack surfaces, and maintenance. For a personal site, that’s overkill. I want to write, review, schedule, and publish. I don’t need user management, plugins, or a PHP runtime. ...

January 18, 2026 · 4 min · Mick Darling

Welcome to the New Site

This site exists because someone on Hacker News decided to be unhelpful. What Happened I had an old WordPress site at mickdarling.com that I hadn’t touched in years. It was a placeholder, nothing more. At some point, the ad network got compromised. One of those fake “MacOS Security Center” malware popups that everyone’s seen before. Did the person who found it send me a note? No. They posted it publicly on HN as a gotcha. Not “hey, your site has a problem.” Just a drive-by to try to make me look bad. ...

January 17, 2026 · 3 min · Mick Darling

About

I like building things. Usually tools that solve problems I keep running into. What I’m Working On Now DollhouseMCP I built the core of DollhouseMCP in the summer of 2025, creating Personas, Skills, Templates, Agents, and Memory Elements as the core of a natural language toolkit for any LLM. It started because I had prompts scattered everywhere—Reddit posts I’d saved, Discord snippets, random notes. The simple solution would have been an organized folder. Instead, I built an MCP server. It works with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and other MCP-compatible systems. Open source, AGPL licensed. You can see the Reddit announcement from August 2025. ...

6 min · Mick Darling