🚀 2026 Relaunch

Last year I wrote a content management system from scratch just for this site. It was a lot of fun, and it gave me the opportunity to do things exactly the way I wanted to do them, which was liberating.

When I wrote that CMS, one of my primary goals was simplicity. I mostly succeeded, but the siren song of complexity, feature creep, and wouldn't-it-be-cool-if is hard to ignore. Thus, complexity crept in and introduced a little too much friction in the authoring process.

Don't get me wrong; that CMS served me well and gave me the chance to explore some new and interesting ideas. Some things, however, just don't pan out the way I expected.

I thought about trying to extract the complexity from that CMS, but after a half-hearted attempt to do so I realized it would be better to start from scratch again. (Well, mostly from scratch. I copied and pasted a lot of good stuff from the old one.)

So, welcome to the 2026 relaunch of my site! (If you're reading this in a feed reader, check it out in your web browser to see the visual changes!)

What's different

This version of the CMS omits several things the old one had. Tags are completely gone, and posts no longer have unique colors or summaries. Instead, I'm only putting an emoji in the title and using that to derive a fun visual appearance for each post.

There's also no longer a distinction between link posts and regular posts. All posts are now just regular posts. I've gone through my previous posts and made adjustments to accommodate those changes as needed.

Another big change: there's not currently a light mode. I might implement one in the future, but for now I really like having a single visual appearance to focus on rather than one with dual modes.

All of those changes eliminate a lot of friction from the writing and publishing process, which is exactly what I wanted. I found it was sometimes a chore to post a quick link or thought, and that meant this site wasn't serving its purpose.

Now I have much less to think about when writing a post. The only requirements are a Markdown file with a title that contains an emoji. I don't have to think about what tags to use, I don't have choose a color, I don't have to decide between a link post or a regular post. I just create a Markdown file and write.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on these changes. You can find the link to email me on my new about page.

Now, time to tackle that backlog of things I've been wanting to write about!