Redesigning the Site

I rebuilt this site. Because of reasons.

The previous version had gradients, colored tags, animated hover effects, reading time estimates with little clock emojis, and a copy-link button that turned green when you clicked it. It was… a lot. I learned a ton building it - CSS animations, dark mode theming, etc - but every time I looked at it, I knew it wasn’t my style (don’t chase the hype kids).

What Changed

I stripped out most of the styling and started over with a simpler approach. No more card hover animations. No more color-coded tags. No more decorative elements that existed just because I could build them.

The new design is mostly text. Lists are just lists. Links turn blue when you hover. The dark mode background is a true neutral gray instead of that blue-tinted thing I had before. It’s boring in the best way.

I took inspiration from sites like leerob.com, shud.in, and brandur.org - developers who’ve figured out that content matters more than presentation. Their sites feel calm. I wanted that.

What I Kept

The infrastructure stayed the same. Still Astro (maybe I dare try the v6 beta?), still Tailwind, still deployed on my homelab through the same CI/CD pipeline. The foundation was solid it was just the paint job that needed work.

What I Learned

Sometimes less really is more. The old design had features I never used (search, tag filtering) and styling that distracted from the actual content. Building it taught me a lot about web development, but using it taught me that I’d over-engineered the whole thing.

This version will probably feel too minimal in six months and I’ll want to add things back. That’s fine. At least now I’m starting from a cleaner baseline.

…oh yeah also I should probably update the content on here more often (: