The Zwolf Personal Intranet, or ZPI, is Clint Zehner's evolving place for the information he needs and the ideas he does not want to lose. Its history reaches back to a personal intranet page he made in 2002, while the current application has grown from quick capture into a project tracker, notes workspace, music player, book library, and personal reference tool.1
The variety follows the way Clint uses it. A thought captured before it disappears may become a task. Text saved at work may need to be read on his phone. A song under development, a book to remember, and questions for a doctor's appointment all need somewhere useful to go.1
The 2002 intranet
Clint's first personal intranet was a web experiment in 2002. It brought together a weather tracker, clocks for the U.S. time zones, links to his most-used sites, a calculator, a scratchpad, and other useful items on one page.1
That early page established the idea of making a personal starting point on the web. The later ZPI application takes the idea much further, giving the information its own structure and allowing it to remain available across computers and a phone.1 2
Write That Down!
The need for quick capture comes from the number and variety of ideas Clint gets. They rarely arrive when he is already at the right desk, in the right application, ready to act on them. Write That Down! gives him a way to save a thought first and decide what to do with it afterward.1 2
The name comes from the British comedy Look Around You, which parodies the educational and science programs of earlier decades. Its imitation of an instructional program supplies an appropriately firm name for a tool whose first job is to keep an idea from vanishing.1 3
Once thoughts had somewhere to be captured, storing them was only the beginning. Some were questions, some were references, and others were things that needed to get done. Write That Down! developed into something like a personal Jira: entries with ticket numbers, projects, priorities, statuses, notes, and an indication of who should act next.1 2
Function before polish
Clint describes the current approach as almost “designless” while he works on function. The interface is deliberately utilitarian as he finds out what the system needs to do. ZPI grows when a recurring problem suggests a feature, then changes again as actual use exposes a better way to handle it.1 2
Projects bring related work together. Search, tags, and connections make it possible to return to an idea without remembering which tab or conversation originally contained it. Longer notes have their own space, while shorter items can move from capture into active work or a backlog.2
The things needed during an ordinary day
The Scratchpad provides a simple bridge between devices. Clint can copy information from his work computer into it and read that information on his phone. Weekly Status gives work-report material a place of its own, with a record of previous weeks that can be revisited.1 2
The music player grew from another immediate use: listening to the Sisters Erie songs he was creating. Music remains available while he moves through the intranet, making the player part of the environment in which the other work happens.1 2
Books need a more substantial memory aid. By October 2026, Clint was on his 200th book of the year. The book-capture and library features give that volume of reading somewhere to be recorded, with separate views for books to read, books currently being read, and books already finished. The implementation includes importing a Goodreads export and extracting editable book information from screenshots.1 4
The medical section serves another everyday reference need. It holds lists of doctors and medications, along with questions to take to an appointment. The questions can be kept with the relevant doctor and saved as a dated visit record afterward.1 4
Connecting chat and text messages
The ChatGPT integration lets Clint work with saved information during a conversation. Through MCP, a connection that exposes selected application tools to the assistant, he can have the assistant find a ticket, read its context, and make an authorized update. The information can return to the project record instead of remaining only in the chat.1 2
Building that connection was also one of the reasons for developing the ZDP Development Protocol. The experience made the process of working with AI an additional project: how to keep context, make progress verifiable, and manage the human effort required along the way.1
ZPI also has an SMS integration built around Twilio. The messaging layer is designed for capturing information, looking up tickets, and handling supported actions through text messages. It is separate from the MCP connection used by the assistant in chat.1 5
Maintaining the intranet
As ZPI grew, updating it became another recurring task worth giving a proper interface. Housekeeping brings maintenance into the application itself. Its update process can inspect a ZIP package and show what it will change before installation, while retaining previous files for rollback. Backups provide another way to preserve the information being collected.1 2 6
That work supports the rest of the project. A place intended to hold ideas, reading, work notes, and useful personal information also needs a manageable way to keep improving. ZPI has expanded from a personal web page into software built around the actual mix of things Clint needs during his day.1