Redesiging the blog
New year, new me, right? I’ve redesigned this website once again.
Over the past year or two I’ve started to appreciate simplicity again. After working so long on convoluted legacy C++ codebases, I’ve given up hope for that language. Every single feature has a footgun that you have to be careful with, and if you don’t know about that footgun, you’re royally fucked. Sure, some of that is due to the C legacy - a beloved language that has a slew of footguns itself. And some of that is needed in order to maintain compatibility and not break existing codebases. And some of that is just to make sure the person you’re talking to always has the one-up.
I’ve seen what complexity can do. How it creeps in and destroys everything, slowly, methodically. How overthinking destroys projects and, eventually, sanity. “An idiot admires complexity, a genius admires simplicity”. I like to pretend I’m smart, so I decided to admire simplicity.
Designing with Stitch
I can’t remember how I decided to use a classic book theme for the new design. I suspect I got it, like always, while waiting at the post office, or the supermarket. That’s how I always get my ideas, for better or for worse…
Initially I tried to do something on my own. While my design implementation skills are top notch, my design planning skills are, unfortunately, very lacking. It never turned out how I wanted it to, so I decided to use Stitch to try and get something going.
The initial results were quite promising:
I liked the cool background gradient, but it seems like it was a static image. I’ve learned a long time ago that bitmap images are not particularly recommended for the kind of things I wanna do, so I decided to drop the background.
The rest of the pages were designed along the lines of the main page, and were fairly easy to implement.
Tech Stack
I once again went for the same trusty and mature framework combination that I’ve used in the past:
- Astro for the site itself.
- Preact for the search functionality in the Projects page. I wanted a React-like API, which I am most familiar with, but without the insane overhead of the actual React libraries. Preact suits this perfectly.
- TalwindCSS for the design. Shocking, I know.
Hosting
This time, though, instead of deploying on Github, I am now using Sourcehut.
Github is the industry standard for code and static site hosting, but it has become bloated in recent years, and I wanted to try something else. Sourcehut seems right for the task - it’s simple and minimal. It gets the job done and gets out of the way. Sure, the documentation might be somewhat lacking - but the excellent hut CLI tool more than makes up for it.
Besides, when the feature set is not large to begin with, exploring the feature set yourself is actually fun and engaging. I miss the days where I just had to figure things out on my own; nowadays shelling out to Claude Code just feels like the default for me.
Configuring it is a breeze, and the publishing process simply envolves creating a tar.gz file and pushing it via the CLI. CI automation followed via builds, and is as easy as pie - specify an image, create a yaml file with your commands, separate them into tasks - and let the service do the rest.