About

Hi, I’m Jonathan Frei.

I’ve been writing online since 2009, when I started the first version of this site on Blogger as an outlet for something that had always been a quiet love and was only then becoming a real passion. The site has moved through several homes and forms since then—Tumblr, a long stretch of self-hosted WordPress, and now this quieter fifth version—but the impulse has stayed the same: a place to put words, notice things, and leave a trail.

In the early years I lived in Fort Myers, Florida with my wife Gaby and our young son Matthew. Before that we were in Steubenville, Ohio, where I worked in public recreation and went to graduate school in the evenings. Professionally I spent a long stretch in digital marketing and program management—roles at companies including KeyedIn Solutions, Adknowledge, NeoGenomics Laboratories, and earlier at dESCO—work that sat at the intersection of advertising, lead generation, and software. Those details are older now, but they shaped a lot of how I think about attention, tools, and the web.

This current version of the site is deliberately smaller. It is less a platform and more a personal archive and notebook. The older material is still here if you want it; the newer material is sparse on purpose.

Get in touch / Follow for updates

You can email me at hi@jonathanfrei.com.

I’m still on X as @jonathanfrei, though I no longer post.

In earlier versions of the site I ran an occasional newsletter and promised not to spam anyone. That same restraint applies now: if I ever start sending updates again, they will be rare and optional.

Where to read more

The full archive of posts—across all the earlier eras is still available.

Earlier versions of the site:

Colophon

This is version 5 of jonathanfrei.com.

It is built with Jekyll 4.x. The source lives in a public GitHub repository. Builds and deploys are handled by GitHub Actions and published to GitHub Pages. The live site is served and cached through Cloudflare.

The design is intentionally minimal: mobile-first, system dark mode via prefers-color-scheme, semantic HTML, skip links, focus styles, and reduced-motion support. Design-system CSS is inlined for fast first paint; code-syntax styles load only on pages that need them. There are no trackers, no comment system, and no third-party scripts beyond what’s required to serve the pages.

Much of the coding and refinement for this version was done with Grok Build 4.5.

Content & Code by Jonathan Frei + his AI assistants