Colophon

In early 2021, I started to feel the need to redesign this website for multiple reasons. I wanted to write more, and experiment with different forms of writing like tweetstorms -- and publish them on my own domain. I wanted to change the site stylistically, and go towards a typography-first, minimalist layout that would render well on all devices. And lastly, I wanted to design and build this from scratch in a way that would be maintainable over the next few years. As a plus, I wanted the ability to extend features and try out experiments around the future of publishing on the internet - specially in the context of decentralization.

Tech stack

The first question was - what platform and technology stack should I use?

Over the years, this website has been hosted on multiple services and platforms. Geocities, Tripodl; Drupal and most recently, Wordpress on NearlyFreeSpeech.net. But one of the challenges of using a pre-built content management system is that you have to work within the confines of what they allow you to do. For this reason, a very simple customization of a wordpress theme can take hours unless you know that system inside-out. And are a PHP guru to boot.

In 2021, Javascript (and TypeScript) rule the roost when it comes to building websites. So it made sense to use the JAM stack. (A side advantage was that I'd brush up my JS skills!). Looking around, I saw Gatsby as the pre-emninent solution and went with it. The framework is a deligh to use, and I highly recommend it.

Design

I used Figma to design the layout. More than a few iterations and lots of inspirations -- hats off to siteinspire.com!

Fonts

• Old Standard TT

• Lora