Rebuilding my blog
I haven't had much time to write, or to refresh this site, in a while. Work and life have kept me busy. But one thing I've really wanted to do is move my old blog over to a new site. I'd already started doing it by hand, and it was taking forever.
This time it went super quick. I've been experimenting with Grok Bot, an AI assistant that works with coding agents, and it's been more than "vibe coding." I described what I wanted, reviewed what came back, and made the calls.
The old site was starting to show its age. It began life as the Next.js starter template, and it looked like it. The nav links went to pages that didn't exist, one post was completely empty, and every page had the same meta description. Not a great look for someone who works on the web.
Going minimal on purpose
I've always liked blogs like overreacted.io and leerob.com. They're one column with good typography and nothing fighting for attention. I don't have hundreds of posts, and a minimal design makes a short list look intentional instead of empty.
What's new
- Dark mode that follows your system setting, with a toggle
- Syntax-highlighted code blocks with a copy button
- Reading time and tags on posts
- An RSS feed, because RSS deserves to live on
- Proper SEO basics: unique descriptions, canonical URLs, Open Graph tags, a sitemap, and robots.txt
How I built it
Most of the hands-on work was done by AI coding agents. First they fixed the broken pages and cleaned up the SEO, then they did the redesign, and each change came back as a pull request I reviewed. I still decided on the design, the wording, and what to leave out, but I didn't have to do most of the typing. It took an evening instead of a few weekends.
The stack
It's still Next.js with Markdown posts, now styled with Tailwind. All the editable text, like the intro and links, lives in one config file, so updating the site doesn't mean digging through components.
The real goal: writing more
A redesign is the easy part. The hard part is showing up with posts. My plan is to write shorter, more frequent notes about things I figure out while building for the web, instead of waiting for the perfect long-form piece.
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