---
title: "Welcome to the new blog"
date: 2026-05-10
description: "The first post in the new design. Why I rewrote the blog from scratch, what changed, and how to read what's here."
tags: ["meta", "astro", "typography"]
---

import Definition from '../../components/Definition.astro';

## Why from scratch

The old blog lived on Jekyll on GitHub Pages. It worked, but it felt
like a generic template - the kind where typography is "default,"
color is "default," and layout is "default." Reading became
functional, but not *pleasant*.

I started from a question: what makes a page worth staying on, worth
reading to the end? The answer - one that looks like a book. A narrow
column of text. A serif with character. Quiet around it. A drop cap
at the start of a chapter, so the eye has somewhere to catch its
breath. Whatever distracts simply doesn't exist here.

## What changed under the hood

The new stack:

- **Astro 5** - generates static pages, zero JavaScript at runtime
  (apart from two small things: the theme toggle and scroll-spy).
- **Cloudflare Pages** instead of GitHub Pages - faster edge,
  preview deployments, cookieless web analytics.
- **Markdown + MDX** in `src/content/posts/`, with schema validation.
- **Self-hosted typography**: Fraunces (variable), IBM Plex Sans, IBM Plex Mono.

<Definition>
**Definition of a literary blog:** a place where the hierarchy of
information serves the rhythm of reading, not the rhythm of scrolling.
</Definition>

## What's next

A few old posts are coming back in a new form - curated, not
wholesale. A few are waiting to be rewritten. The rest - if you feel
they've vanished for good, they probably weren't that important to you.

If you have something to say: find me on GitHub, and the RSS feed
lives at `/en/rss.xml`. There are no comments here - this isn't an
arena.

Read slowly.