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Fresh start

My old personal site was a Jekyll Freelancer theme from 2014 — Bootstrap 3, jQuery 1.11, a PHP contact form that hadn’t worked in years, and three placeholder “project” posts I never replaced. It served its purpose (mostly: existing) but it stopped representing me a long time ago.

So I wiped it.

The new stack is Astro with Tailwind CSS v4 and MDX, deployed to GitHub Pages via the official withastro/action. Zero client-side JavaScript by default, content collections with type-safe frontmatter, fast builds, simple deploys. The whole rebuild took an afternoon.

A few things I’m trying to do differently this time:

  • Fewer pretend projects. Everything I list is real and shipped. The metrics are honest.
  • Writing matters. A blog with two posts in eight years (which is what the old site had — zero, actually) signals nothing. I’d rather have a small number of posts I’d actually want someone to read.
  • Update it. The old site had a Now page that froze in 2018. I’d rather not repeat that.

If you’re maintaining a 10-year-old static site that’s drifted: it doesn’t take long to start over. The hardest part is deciding what to keep, and the answer is usually “less than you think.”

The source is on GitHub.

← all writing