The title really couldn’t get much cheesier. In a way, that was the point. Still I wish I had something better. Anyway…

Welcome back. It’s been a while (a month, really) and I’ve found myself completely redoing my website. If you’re reading this soon after it’s posted, then you likely haven’t seen what the final product is. I’m still toying around with things, and likely will be for a while. That being said, design wise, it’s finished. Which is why I’ll be finally assigning grayvox.dev to point to here instead of my old site.

Speaking of the old site, I’m not taking it down entirely. The source code can be found here, if anyone finds it of interest, but everything about that website is saved for all of eternity (or however long it takes for something to make Git repos irrelevant). I considered tying it to old.grayvox.dev for historical purposes, but that’s a project for another day. I could care less about the old site, really. If anything, making it public would be pointless - outside of me occasionally visiting it to say “Oooh look, I used a subdomain. I’m so cool.”

Today I wanted to look back on the old site to reflect on the things that annoyed me, and then look at how I attempted to ‘fix’ those problems with this new site. And yes, this website is in fact a whole recode. Nothing about the old website is present here, outside of the old blog posts.

Without further ado, let’s begin.

I don’t hate themes, really

I promise the Header 3 is true. I actually loved the theme I used over on the old site (which was Dante, if you were curious), but it just wasn’t sitting well with me. Being a simple man of simple thoughts with simple problems (Yeah, right), I wanted to feel like this site was a labor of love - not a premade experience.

That being said, I did use the default Astro Blog setup, but I wouldn’t count it as a theme (It really only did some starter structuring and set up a content collection to save time 😔). Raw dogging the CSS gave me full control too, and a feeling of “I built that.” versus what I had before with Dante. But I like to think it was a legal seperation instead of a divorce. I’m keeping the kids btw. :)

Some choice words for npm

Okay, that’s putting it strongly. npm is super important to the JavaScript ecosystem, and for that it deserves our respect. But if there’s one thing about npm that irritates me, it’s the dreaded node_modules folder. If your project had an annoying roommate who’s stuff took up too much space in the apartment, this folder is probably that roommate. Also, npm is slow (in comparison to the other options). As much as I sound like I hated that experience, it wasn’t the main reason I ditched the old site. Though I did switch package managers.

It took me a bit of debate, because I was torn between pnpm and Bun (Sorry, Yarn). Bun kept making me curious though, solely because I’d heard so much about the performance, and hadn’t really tried it. Maybe now was my chance to do that. Except… well, I really didn’t have a good reason to not reach for Bun, but I’d been using pnpm on a number of other projects so I felt more comfortable with that. I was really just focused on improving storage space, so pnpm seemed like enough. Besides, the idea of learning a whole new tool for something I wanted to just ship and be done with fast kept nagging at me. Also, YML files. Love them. Fight me on that one if you want.

To be fair though, a static site made an Astro isn’t a good example of when node_modules is a gut-punching experience. Still, pnpm just felt like a good move, and I like trying new stuff. Besides, with Deno 2 out, I’m finding technologies that don’t reinvent the wheel (but rather, improve what’s already been done) to be far more enjoyable.

I forgot Tailwind

Unfortunately, there was another “casualty” in the process of changing sites: I left behind Tailwind. Or rather, just plain forgot about it.

But why? Put simply, I’ve never actively used it. Which is insane, I know, I really want to try it. But in a case where I wanted this project done and not be lingering around with new tech troubleshooting, I ended up just… leaving it behind. I’ve seen the uses though, and I’m at the very least, interested. But building a static site that—let’s face it—has very little CSS needs, doesn’t seem like a good place to learn Tailwind anyway.

So, what did I learn?

I think it’s obvious that I had a number of opportunities to switch to newer tech over sticking to my tried and true methods. Call me old school, especially on the case of Tailwind, but I am glad it worked out the way it did. From the Discord-style roles, to the Excalidraw ‘scribbles’ hanging around the pages, I love it. Really… until I come up with something else to add. We’re not going to dwell on that notion though.

But of course, I will be giving Bun and Tailwind a try though, because it’d be a bit nuts to not even mess around with them.

Until next time.