The material already exists
My detailed boat records live privately in NautiFile, the boat-records app I’m building to keep projects, equipment, service history, documents, photographs, and expenses together. It is also a software project in its own right; here is the story behind building it.
Conversations while troubleshooting add more context: what I noticed, what I tried, and why I changed direction. The notes multiply quite happily. Filing themselves remains a work in progress.
The idea behind this site is to turn selected parts of that material into useful articles. A reader should be able to understand the original problem, follow the important tests, and see the current outcome.
The workflow I’m working toward
- Select a project and the records relevant to it.
- Assemble the timeline, observations, and photographs.
- Use AI to propose a readable draft.
- Check the facts, missing details, and what is suitable to share.
- Publish the reviewed article and revise it as the project develops.
That is the intended workflow, rather than a claim that an automatic publishing connection is already running. These first articles are a starting point for figuring out how the process should work.
Preserving the evidence
The most useful distinction is between what I observed, what I suspected, and what testing confirmed. A controller board with visible corrosion is an observation. Cleaning it is an action. A successful test would establish whether communication returned.
AI can help organize that sequence, but it should not fill an unanswered question with a convenient conclusion. When the records disagree, I want the uncertainty preserved until it can be resolved. A confident paragraph is still not a repaired thruster.
Choosing what to share
The public article does not need every detail from the private record. It needs the information that makes the project understandable and useful: the equipment, symptoms, relevant tests, selected photographs, and result.
Home details, boat location, identifying paperwork, and private correspondence stay out of the articles. Photos need the same attention as text.
If the process works well, maintaining this journal can become a small extension of documenting the project itself.
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