The design language is (understandably) feeling a bit 2013 these days, but objectively I think it's held up great.
It's something I'd like to do for my blog, since I'm getting tired of looking at the same static header, but I've yet to come up with the perfect design.
Not a fan, even though it might look “nice”.
(As viewed on an iPhone)
Perhaps the noise doesn't "scale" on mobile as I'm also viewing it on an iPhone and/or is just more apparent in dark mode.
background-image: url(/css/noise.png);
background-repeat: repeat;
background-size: 182px;
filter: brightness(6);
opacity: 0.018;
Here's the last one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31987713
Perhaps it's related to android version, Firefox version or constraints imparted by your budget phone, but it's not a mobile layout//Firefox specific problem as far as I can tell (and I have like a dozen add-ons installed now that we can install from the full Firefox catalog).
What are your thoughts on HTMX, how would that play when your using the Tailwinds stuff? (sorry, I am not familiar enough to perhaps use precise nomenclature on these two - but just curious on your thought on HTMX as it would relate to your post?
I always enjoy playing with new tech, and HTMX looks fun, though I wouldn't use it for anything serious. If you're looking for something fun and simple, I'd 100% recommend using Svelte on Astro, they're both a joy to use.
I built this with Next.js to learn, because I use it at work, and need to stay 100% up to date when I'm educating others. It also just has such a huge ecosystem which is hard to match.
Tailwind's Catalyst UI kit only supports React, so it wouldn't work I'm afraid!
I will say, though, that there's a bit more manual labor involved in setting up a page and writing content than I would prefer. In some of my articles it would have definitely saved time to just write the content in markdown, and there are a few repeated components on each page that would definitely be nice to extract out.
So anyway, maybe some kind of minor refactor is in order - although every time I consider doing this, I try to remind myself that actually writing / making content is the more important thing to spend time on. Maybe if I ever get to the point where I'm writing multiple posts a week it would be worth optimizing the workflow more.
Exciting to see what more comes whenever you post. Digging this cursor blog as well.
For me, it is overkill. I went in the opposite direction this year, putting more emphasis on my posts (and their readability) rather than visual flourish.
I am planning to do further optimizations (such as font subsetting) to reduce the burden on my site's visitors later this year.
That’s a really nice touch. It does help me with reading, kudos.
feels like something that could be baked into JSX 2.0 bc its such a common need
I may have to revive my own blog now...
Hackernews = 99.9% idle , 0 rendering
Your new blog = 94% idle, 4.7% rendering + painting
Someone mentioned the fans / activity monitor showing cpu usage as well
Even with full static generation, Next.js still makes your site a React application. A page might be pre-rendered completely on the server, but Next will still ship JS to the client for hydrating ... zero dynamic content. Here, speed is not a concern for me (I believe the performance impact (ab)using React for text content is negligible), but the fact that it is just ... not ideal?, irks me so much.
Then I turn to Zola, a more traditional SSG, but then for any interactivity or demo in the posts, I need to add my own vanilla JS, which is a hassle to maintain, and I am not a very good developer. (Though Zola is excellent for completely static sites, much nicer than Hugo IMO.)
I want the site to have zero JS except the sprinkle of React components in the middle of otherwisr semantic DOM nodes for content. The fact that this was seemingly impossible in Next.js is just mind-boggling to me. Then I discovered Astro, which does exactly what I want, no more, no less. Only write markdown? Slap in the official Markdown plugin. Want latex math? Slap in the official remark/rehype plugins and katex stylesheet. Want react components in the middle of the post? Just import it into MDX files. The result? Absolutely no JS if there are no React components, otherwise the only JS shipped is restricted to those components.
(That should have been the logical way to build frontend, and now Next.js is following Remix and Astro with its fine-grained component approach using RSC. Too bad the last time I tried the app router, all markdown plugins broke, while Astro is building my site beautifully.)
Last time I created a blog I aimed to have it up that day.
IMO the text is more important than the HTML and CSS
Of course, I'm not a designer myself so I would see all of this as overkill if I tried to do it. It's enough for me to write in org-mode and export my blog as HTML with a nice template. A static file server can handle a small bunch of HTML files at scale without breaking a sweat, so no need for the JS take on SSR or AWS Lambda functions or what have you.
There are some moments when you shouldn't use WordPress. A blog is not one of those moments.
Avoiding the obvious tool for the job is classic developer trendytool syndrome.
And yes, this is what I do: maintaining 50+ sites for clients, so I have been round the block a few times, not just making this up.
Also, trying new technologies was literally a goal of the project.
WordPress is insanely customisable - it's "just php". And sure, maybe his new skill learning could be coding on WordPress :-)
I was making a point that the best tool for the job can sometimes be the one which is widely used, hugely supported, cheap to host, well understood - it may not be the trendy choice, but "trendy" is not (in my humble opinion) a terribly good criteria for tech stack decisions...
If you don't want a pre-built theme, you don't need the plugin ecosystem, and you don't need/want a WYSIWYG editor, there's no reason to choose Wordpress.
So: sure, if your cdn and static files can do all of those then yeh. But it can’t.
It would be titled “A New Blog Post for 2024” if all he did was write a new blog post. But if you read the blog post, you’ll see that he overhauled the entirety of his blog.
Maybe an analogy would help. If you’re a game developer and you replace the game engine of your game, you might update your in-game “about/credits” page to mention “in release x.y.z we switched from Unity to Unreal Engine” — what you wouldn’t do is say “in release x.y.z we updated this in-game ‘about’ page to, well… mention that we changed the about ‘about’ page to now state that we changed the ‘about’ page”.