refresh - some updates

it’s been a while.

the last time i posted anything here was june 2024. a lot has happened since then. i couldn’t kick the urge to rebuild this site from scratch since then. mostly because the file management/content management was cumbersome. the entire site would break if the frontmatter was off in a pushed commit.

what changed

• new layout
• new fonts
• new cms
• new media section

the old site was good. i’m proud of it in that, so much of it was done myself. but updating it meant opening an IDE, writing markdown, committing to git, and pushing. for someone who already stares at a monitor all day for work, the last thing i wanted to do at 9pm – fixing bugs and console errors just to write.

so i rebuilt everything with astro and keystatic (a modern cms platform especially made for astro). now i can write from my phone, or any browser. no terminal required. it felt necessary given the current state of things.

what stayed

the spirit of the original site is the same; a place to dump whatever’s in my head. blog posts, a digital garden, creative projects, training logs, media tracking. all the things that make a personal site personal. color scheme is relatively the same. i also don’t have a light mode, but i don’t know that i will.

what’s next

AI has made a lot of this easier if i’m honest. despite my existential dreadcreep around it, this site would’ve taken me months to migrate, redo the layout, and include QoL updates. i have a backlog of things i want to write about and build into this site. for now, i’m just happy the foundation is solid and the friction to publish is basically gone… for now.

-joe