My new site is live!

I had writing scattered across a few different platforms for years. It existed. It just didn’t have a home that felt like mine.

That bothered me more than it probably should have.

So I spent the last few weeks building this one from scratch.

The choices that mattered

I could have used a hosted platform. Ghost, Squarespace, something with a theme marketplace and a drag-and-drop editor. Nothing wrong with that path. But it had been a few years since I’d built a website from scratch, and I wanted to learn what the tooling actually looks like now. That meant picking a real stack and working through it, not handing the decisions to a platform.

The stack I landed on: Astro for the framework, Cloudflare Pages for hosting. Both decisions came together quickly. The harder calls were the design ones.

How the homepage should be laid out. What goes in the nav and what doesn’t. The typography, the color palette, the way content is organized across sections. None of that has a right answer. You make choices and live with them until you know better. That back-and-forth takes real time, and it should.

How the build went

I fed Claude Code my resume, links to sites I liked, rough descriptions of what I wanted each page to do. It built. I reacted. A lot of “close, but the hierarchy is off” and “make this feel less like a template.” The back-and-forth is the work.

Strong prompts and concrete examples make everything faster. I knew that going in, so I front-loaded the context: reference pages, specific layout descriptions, the exact feeling I was going for. Things landed closer on the first try, which meant less iteration and more building. That compresses a lot of time.

Migrating the writing

Bringing posts over from other platforms was its own process. Some content moved cleanly. Some needed editing before I wanted it here. A few posts I decided weren’t worth carrying forward at all.

That kind of curation is useful. When your writing is scattered, you don’t always see what’s actually good and what you just published because you had something to say that week. Moving it into one place forced a pass I probably should have done a long time ago.

It’s not done

The site is live but not finished. There are sections I want to expand, photography to upload, more to build out. That’s fine.

A site that exists and is imperfect is more useful than a perfect one that doesn’t. This one exists. The rest I can keep building.