There is a point with some projects where the technology they started with no longer really describes what they have become.
InPlay.finance reached that point a long time ago.
It originally started inside WordPress because, at the time, that was the quickest and most sensible place for me to build it. I already had the infrastructure around it, I could add features quickly, and I wasn't trying to predict what the product might become several years later.
But InPlay kept growing.
Eventually I wasn't really building a WordPress website anymore. I was building a stock discovery and analysis application that just happened to have WordPress sitting underneath it.
This week I finally changed that.
What is InPlay.finance?
InPlay is a project I've been developing for years to help surface stocks that are doing something interesting in the market.
The basic idea comes from the concept of a stock being "in play". Rather than starting with thousands of tickers and trying to decide where to look, InPlay looks for the stocks showing the sort of activity that might make them worth investigating.
That can include things such as unusual volume, significant price moves, gaps, news, changing market behaviour and other signals that suggest a stock is attracting attention.
Over time I've added watchlists, live market information, individual stock pages, historical data, alerts, signals, a trading journal and other tools around that central idea.
It has gradually become less of a feature and more of a product.
And that is exactly why keeping it tied to WordPress stopped making much sense.
I didn't want to rebuild it from scratch
There is always a temptation with an old project to decide that everything would be better if you just started again.
I deliberately didn't do that.
The important parts of InPlay already worked. Years of development had gone into the application, the data, the logic and the way I use it.
I didn't need a new InPlay.
I needed to remove the parts of the old architecture that were no longer helping it.
So rather than embarking on some enormous rewrite, I've separated the application from WordPress and given it a much cleaner home of its own.
That also gave me an opportunity to clear out old assumptions, simplify parts of the application and fix a few things that had accumulated over the years.
InPlay still feels like InPlay. It just now has an architecture that better reflects what it actually is.
The bigger project is Control Room
The more interesting part for me is actually what sits around InPlay now.
I've been building my own system called Control Room, and increasingly I see that becoming the proprietary layer that sits behind the different things I build through 1J2.
I've spent more than two decades building websites, applications, plugins, content systems and random tools whenever I've needed them.
Historically, they have often ended up with their own little systems around them.
The site has one way of managing something. Another project has a different way. Another WordPress installation has another version of the same idea. Then another tool appears because I need to solve the same problem somewhere else.
Control Room is gradually changing that.
Rather than every project needing its own separate way of handling public content, analytics, publishing and eventually other common services, I can build those capabilities once and allow my different projects to use them.
InPlay is now part of that.
Its application can concentrate on being InPlay, while Control Room can increasingly manage the public-facing layer around it.
And that fits into a much wider goal I have for 1J2: bringing more of my sites and products under one proprietary roof instead of continually assembling them from disconnected platforms.
The next opportunity is AEO
The part I'm particularly interested in now is content.
I've been doing a lot of work around AEO, or answer engine optimisation, and thinking about how websites need to change as people increasingly discover information through AI-powered search experiences rather than traditional lists of ten blue links.
InPlay is potentially a very interesting project for that because it already processes a huge amount of structured market information.
Every trading day it is identifying stocks, movements, volume, themes, signals and market activity.
Traditionally, I might have thought of that application data and website content as two completely separate things.
I don't think they need to be.
What if the product itself can identify what is worth writing about?
This is where I think things become much more interesting.
If InPlay can identify which stocks are attracting unusual attention, it also gives me a strong indication of the questions people may soon be asking.
Why is a particular stock moving?
What does a company actually do?
Why has its trading volume suddenly increased?
What has happened to the share price?
What news is affecting it?
How does today's move compare with previous trading days?
Those are exactly the sorts of questions that work naturally in search, Google AI experiences and other answer engines.
Instead of operating a conventional finance blog where I sit down and randomly choose subjects to write about, InPlay can potentially help determine what matters.
The product discovers what is happening.
The data helps create useful supporting content.
That content becomes searchable and indexable.
Someone researching a stock can discover InPlay through that information and then use the application to explore the live market data behind it.
That is a much more interesting loop to me than simply "adding a blog".
Content as another output from the data
I think this is going to become an increasingly important distinction with the sites I'm building.
Content doesn't necessarily have to begin with a blank editor.
If a product already understands something useful, content can become another way of presenting that understanding.
InPlay already has years of historical market information alongside what it is detecting today.
That opens up opportunities for individual company explainers, market-move analysis, historical pages, educational content and answers to very specific questions about stocks and trading activity.
And importantly, I don't want the result to become a factory producing thousands of meaningless AI pages.
The whole advantage is that the starting point is real information that the product itself is already collecting and analysing.
The goal is useful content first, structured in a way that search engines and AI systems can also understand.
One roof, different products
This is also why Control Room is becoming increasingly important to me.
I don't want to turn every project into the same website.
InPlay should still be InPlay.
Sahara Sands should still be Sahara Sands.
Cock Your Hat should still be Cock Your Hat.
They have completely different audiences, purposes and identities.
What I do want is for the underlying systems I've built to start working together.
Publishing, analytics, content management, AI tools, payments and other shared capabilities don't necessarily need to be reinvented every time I start another project.
Control Room can increasingly become that common layer while the individual products remain independent above it.
InPlay finally has room to become what it already was
The funny thing is that moving InPlay away from WordPress hasn't suddenly turned it into a different product.
It has actually done the opposite.
It has allowed me to acknowledge what I had already built.
InPlay stopped being a WordPress feature years ago. The architecture just hadn't caught up yet.
Now it has.
And rather than feeling like the end of an old development project, the move has made me far more interested in where I can take InPlay next.
The immediate opportunity is combining its stock discovery capabilities with the AEO work I've been developing elsewhere.
That means using what InPlay already knows to create better explanations, better stock pages and genuinely useful searchable content around what is actually happening in the market.
It is also another step towards something I've increasingly realised I want from 1J2.
Not dozens of disconnected websites held together with different platforms and plugins.
A collection of distinct products, all increasingly powered by technology I own and control.
Control Room is becoming that roof.
And InPlay is now properly underneath it.
