elsonng
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New and Improved Blog!

A new look at the website

miscellaneous3 min read

It's been a while since I have last updated my website (Back in 2023) and a lot of things have changed since then. Now that gpt-5.6 has just been released, I wanted to take this opportunity to test it out and refresh the website while I am at it.

Here is a look at some of the design decisions I made for the blog.

Markdown for Content

Back then, I really want to be able to update the website regularly without touching the code base, and this was best done by integrating a content management system (CMS). I settled for Sanity then as it had a generous free tier with CDN and a hosted editor included.

Since then though, markdown files have really become the norm for 'storing' content, primarily for LLM processing but I figured why not used GitHub to store the content as well, so I have one less dependency and free storage.

Blazing Fast

One of my criteria for this new revamp is that it has to load super fast.

To do so:

  • Most pages are staticly served at build time with no database or API for rendering
  • Images and fonts are optimized by NextJs
  • Blog search loads only when someone focuses on the search field

Readibility

To reduce glare and prioritise readibility, I stuck with an olive theme colour with Atkinson as the primary font.

Keyboard/Terminal Navigation

I have gotten pretty deep into terminal-based workflows and skeumorphism recently so I thought it would be pretty cool if I could have a mock terminal window that lets me navigate through the website purely using terminal commands.

Try it out by pressing back tick! (` - The key beside your number 1 key)

No AI Slop

We have all seen how shitty frontends done by vibecoders look like and I really wanted to prove that its really a skill issue here. AI inherently has no taste and the onus is on the developer to steer it towards proper frontend practices, with the help of design systems, proper UI/UX practices and design vocabulary.

Final Thoughts

Lighthouse performance report

I am super happy with how this turned out. gpt-5.6 was particularly good at understanding my verbatim requirements and writing tests and I really only needed a few prompts to get it to a decent working state.

It's really crazy how something that would have taken me at least a few weekends in the past, be done in just a few hours. Who knows what newer models can do in 1-2 more years?

On that note, here's to more technical blogs coming up in future!