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Website Redesign v11

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From Boston, MA

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You can check out the blog posts tagged with the Redesign tag to see all related redesign blog posts!

TL;DR

I've once again updated my personal website, this time built on top of an in-progress new RSC framework for vite that I've been calling Guava, and a new CMS system that I hope to publicly announce soon called Cirrus.

(Lack of) Features

This redesign, unlike several before it, doesn't actually come with much in terms of new features or capabilities. Instead most of the work was done behind the scenes, primarily both in building on top of a new RSC framework and also a new CMS ecosystem as well.

Framework

My previous redesign which I released just over a year ago was built on top of Waku, this latest iteration is built on a totally new RSC framework on Vite that I've been using for several side projects as of late.

The new framework is conceptually a bit like Waku in that its fairly flexible, it gives complete control of the underlying server being used to the user. Personally I've been using it in conjunction with hono, but any server framework should work!

I hope to polish up the docs and finish publishing the library to share with more folks soon!

Managing Content

All previous iterations of my personal site involved checked in post content, either painstakingly hand authored artisanal HTML, or more recently markdown (MDX to be specific). This iteration breaks from that history and leverages a new ecosystem of packages that I've been loosely working on in the background for a little over a year and a half now[1]Jump to footnote.

Most past iterations of these website redesigns involved either manually migrating my prior blog posts, or writing scripts to migrate them for me. This is the first migration where I asked an agent to do that work for me (and thankfully it wrote a script to manage the migration and verify the changes).

One of the most annoying pain points of my previous blogging setup was that I needed access to git in order to push changes, and more recently I also needed to run some kind of a prebuild command locally first and check-in the resulting assets before deploying a new blog post or micropost.

Now that I am using a CMS, I can easily add/edit/update content on the fly, and everything just works! Media like images in posts gets hosted in an R2 bucket, the posts are stored in a D1 db, they get transformed on the fly using my mdxlite library, the RSS feed gets dynamically regenerated on changes, and the og image for the posts get generated on the fly as well (also cached in R2).

There's still some rough edges that I want to polish over, and also I want to find a way to connect this with my current personal knowledge management app of choice so I have one surface to edit/manage all my content, but I think this is a really flexible building block that I can start with!

Footnotes:

↩Back to reference The initial work for these packages started around Thanksgiving in 2024, when at the time I was heavily using Cursor's Composer model! More recent work in the framework has been done with Sonnet 5 and GPT5.6 Sol.

Tags:

Web DevelopmentDevelopmentRedesign

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