Blow the party horns. My first ever post on this version of the blog happened on June 18, 2024 even though it says the 17th, i still need to fix that. It is now June 16, 2025. Close enough. HAPPY ONE YEAR!!!!!

To be fair, I did change the backend from Next.js to Astro around eight months ago, so I haven’t been on this specific core of the blog for a year, but as far as the design goes, it’s been almost a full year. Wowzers.

I figured now would be a good time to do a little reflection of this site to honor the occassion, so let’s do that. This may end up looking like a collection of random notes, but since I’m doing this for myself as much as I am doing it for The Gram®, I figured just getting these thoughts out there, no matter how neatly they’re organized, would be the best approach.

what worked

The design Just Works™ for the most part. It has a light and dark mode theme that syncs with your browser, that functionality works very well thanks to Tailwind, and currently I have no plans for iterating on that (adding a toggle to keep it on light or dark & saving it with a cookie, for example). I like how things are mostly text focused with minimal added fluff.

Astro as a framework mostly works. I like how I can create standalone MDX pages that Just Work™, albeit with some extra addons and configuring needed. It has a solid foundation for me to work off of but also allows me to go beyond it if needed. I really like how it uses server-side rendering instead of client-side rendering like a lot of other “modern” frameworks — navigating it feels like how web pages should work.

what didn’t

The current dark theme needs a bit more contrast. I know it’s bad to put blue text on a black background, but I did it anyway, and there are some darker hues that just do not work.

I love the monospace font, Monofur… but I’m not sure if it’s working well for what I want to use it for. I might need to try out different fonts in the future and see if there’s a similarly quirky once that’s more legible I could use instead (e. comic mono / shanns).

Next.js… was okay at first, but not the right fit for me. It’s designed for 🍊-worthy SPA’s, not personal blogs. Astro is starting to hit similar notes for me now, but that’s mostly in how it’s a more niche framework not a lot of people have built stuff around. Also, the “content” system is inferior to Contentlayer in my very humble opinion. I would rather just use Contentlayer than have to work around Astro’s built-in content management system like I have to do now.

what to do next

First, update a bunch of stuff on the site that is no longer relevant to my current situation. I no longer have a “school bag”, for example, and my trusty M1 MacBook Air currently has the macOS 26 beta on it… because I’m not really using it much anymore.

I’ve already done a couple of minor visual tweaks, like (finally) making the maximum content width a bit higher to better fill out large desktop screens… but that’s lead to some slight consequences, like with the banner image on blog posts being way too big and pushing the rest of the content down. Now that I am no longer trying to follow my No JavaScript Ever™ policy, I think building in some slight responsive design would be cool. I’ll need to work on the design, though.

For bigger things, I need to do a full accessibility sweep. Make sure any sticking points are addressed. Possibly get plaintext versions of posts up and running to later utilize when I (again, possibly) make a geminispace fork of the site.

If I decide it’s time to do a backend rewrite (because i love doing those for some reason), try going for a framework that has less batteries included. My mentor is really into Hono because of how light it is, but I really hate how it does routing. Something like that or HTMX would be worth looking into if I want to go that route, though.

And finally… I need to make it easier for me to update this blog.