Redesigning my site in the open

I haven’t updated my personal website since late 2019 – probably the longest period ever between two redesigns – and it has held up well for over 4 years, but it’s now time for a refresh. I have several motivations for this latest effort. Primarily, I’m writing more and would like a blog-first design, something that can be a permanent home for my thoughts on the internet for decades to come, and I’m also itching to write more code lately, with Jekyll being a pretty low friction way of getting back into it. Additionally, I’ve been toying around with the idea of building a Notion-driven Jekyll competitor, so I figured that before embarking on that, I’d make at least a serious attempt at building something on Jekyll to see where it performs well and where it falls short.

To this end, I’d also like to experiment with designing this site directly in code; I’ve done this on some smaller projects before, but never tried it on anything of this level, so it should be a fun and interesting experience. I have a general idea of where I’d like to go with the design, but am planning on figuring most of it out as I go, so I can expect this site to be pretty janky while it is under construction.