design

Oh My Word is a podcast I made with Michael Moruzzi a few years ago: sixteen episodes on Watford FC in the 1990s, a season at a time, with detours into matchdays, fanzines and the man who commentated on it all. It has sat on Spotify and Apple ever since, which is another way of saying it has been unsearchable.

That is what the new site is for. Previously: twenty hours of two people talking about Kevin Phillips and Graham Taylor’s return, and no way to find the bit you half-remember. Every episode now carries its full transcript on the page, each paragraph anchored to its timestamp, so you can send someone the exact minute instead of telling them it is somewhere in the 1996-97 one.

The transcripts were the hard bit. Speech recognition knows little about football and less about Watford: Vicarage Road came back as “Riccarton Road”, Roger ‘Harry’ Willis turned up twice in the same sentence (once was too many), and at one point my agency’s name leaked out of the transcription tool’s account settings and made a stadium announcer into “the Omne Tannoy”. A thousand-odd corrections later, they read… better.

What stayed in is the part I find more interesting. Michael gave Luther Blissett’s last goal as his 168th; the club record is 186. I read out Wimbledon’s scorers and say Robbie Keane, who never played for them, when I meant Robbie Earle. Both are on the tape exactly as written down. Fixing the transcription is the job. Fixing the speaker is somebody else’s.

Some details worth noting:

• Clicking a timestamp seeks the audio and docks a small player, so the transcript stays a transcript instead of turning into a second play button
• A #t-5326 link cues that moment on arrival without autoplaying
• Sixteen text files and one JSON file go in, seventeen pages come out, via a Python script. No framework, no build step
• The design is matchday programme by way of fanzine: Big Shoulders Display over Newsreader, printed on newsprint that is not there

The name is Mike Vince’s. He commentated on Watford for local radio for years and said “oh my word” whenever the afternoon called for it. Episode ten is the best part of an hour with him.

Occupation Road is a second site, built from this one’s codebase and designed so you wouldn’t know it. It contains long essays on the business of modern football, filtered through the lens of Watford FC.

It came out of a research vault. Since May I’ve kept one in Obsidian called Watford Intelligence: reading in, synthesis out, three hundred-odd sources so far. Once there was enough in it, a publication more or less suggested itself. I’d wanted to write about the club for a while anyway, having made Oh My Word, a podcast about Watford in the 1990s, a few years back. But this here site is a timeline of what I’m reading and watching, and it was never the right home for three thousand words on parachute payments.

Occupation Road took the job instead: long essays on the club’s finances, ownership and structure, argued from the statutory accounts rather than from the mood after Saturday.

Technically it’s a second instance of Showrunner’s core (Next.js, Supabase, Vercel), copied selectively rather than forked. The auth stack, markdown pipeline, admin CMS and search came across. The external feeds, and everything that makes this site a timeline, did not.

The harder job was making sure it didn’t look like this place. Same skeleton, different person wearing it, which meant giving up Showrunner’s typefaces along with its palette. The masthead is a UK street nameplate: bordered plate, letterspaced capitals, WATFORD underneath in signal red.

Some details:

• Charts are set as statutory accounts in plain HTML and CSS, no chart library, and sit in a margin column beside the prose
• Essays travel one way out of the vault via a publish skill that resolves the wiki-links and writes the slug back into the source file
• The favicon is the nameplate with the type taken out, on the grounds that a keyline box holding two lines of wide-tracked capitals is a grey smudge at 16px

Comments are off permanently, there are no ads, and nothing tracks you beyond server logs. It went live today, on the opening Friday of the 2026–27 league season, with one essay and two notes.

By way of explanation, Occupation Road itself is the service road behind the Sir Elton John Stand, officially the Yellow Brick Road since 2023 though the old name has stuck. Mike Vince, whose commentary catchphrase gave the podcast its title, worked the gantry on that side of the ground all decade.

“Viewability and time-on-page are very important metrics these days. Every hostile UX decision originates from this single fact. The longer you’re trapped on the page, the higher the CPM the publisher can charge. Your frustration is the product. No wonder engineers and designers make every UX decision that optimizes for that. And you, the reader, are forced to interact, wait, click, scroll multiple times because of this optimization. Not only is it a step in the wrong direction, it is adversarial by design.”

In the early 1990s, two Russian artists named Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid hired a market research firm to survey the public on what they wanted in a work of art. Across 11 countries they then set about painting a piece that reflected the results. Each piece was intended to be a unique a colla

A brief typographic history of the influential Japanese comic.