Hey, I'm Jeremy

Hey, I’m Jeremy.

This is my first post here, so it seems fair to start with who I am and what you’ll find on this site.

How I got here

One day at school, I climbed to the top of the bleachers with a stack of business cards and tossed them into the air. They rained down on whoever happened to be walking by.

I’d printed them myself with an Avery at-home card kit. They were for The Wildcat Forums, a phpBB forum I built so students could chat online and talk about schoolwork. And homework, of course.

I handed cards out other times too, and eventually the whole school knew about the forum. Then the teachers shut it down. They thought we’d use it to cheat on homework.

That was around my freshman or sophomore year. I graduated in 2011. Later I built another phpBB forum, United Geek Society, for me and a friend to talk tech. We thought it was cool to build a community. It faded as I moved on to other things.

The part I remember most from those forum days is opening up the database behind them for the first time. Every post and every member was right there. I felt like a spy who’d snuck into the control room. Okay, I was a nerd. But I was a nerd who felt like a spy.

Once I figured out how it all fit together, it took over. I wanted to know more, so I started learning HTML and CSS.

I never really stopped making websites after that.

What I do now

These days I build websites for small businesses as Websites by Jeremy, out of Trumann, Arkansas.

I spent years figuring out what makes a website work, and somewhere along the way I fell in love with the logistics of it. Then I noticed that most people don’t know what a site needs to succeed, or even to keep running properly.

I’ve always wanted to help people, and this is how I get to do it. When a business does well, its employees do well. So do their families, and so does the local economy.

I also spend a lot of time experimenting with AI tools and agents. I’m curious how far they can go and where they fall short. I still make the calls on what gets built.

What else I’m into

I write. I started writing to help me deal with trauma, and it slowly turned into a hobby. I didn’t think I was any good at it. Then people started reaching out, and I ended up with a small following on Medium.

I’m still figuring out what to write about next. Maybe that’s where this blog comes in.

I also write songs, and I tinker with game projects in Roblox.

What to expect here

Mostly, I want this to be a place for posts and tools that help people. Some of that will be about building for the web and what I’m learning with AI. Some will be side projects. Some will be personal writing, when I have something worth saying.

If you want to follow along, there’s an RSS feed, and I’m on X at @jscollinsco.

Thanks for reading the first one.