My blog is not minimal

/ 3 min read

I’ve finally gotten to the point where I’m sharing this site with more people. One of the first remarks I generally get is that it looks nice but very minimal. I disagree, not out of pride or defensiveness, but out of a simple difference in philosophy. I figured I’d write a post about exploring that part of my brain, and why I made the design decisions I did when it came to my personal website.

I guess my first point is that I did not try to make a minimal blog, but rather tried very hard not to over-engineer something so simple. I feel that the point of view of most people who want a personal site, and this used to be mine as well, is to make it as sexy as possible, as to wow people I suppose. I tried to make my thought flow a bit more sophisticated. I realized that I just wanted a place to write my thoughts for now.

I realized for my needs, I don’t need a landing page with parallax effects. I don’t need a header with my personal logo and 4 tabs. I don’t need an about section or a projects section - I used LinkedIn for that. I don’t need a footer, I don’t need anything of the sort. I’m a human being, not a SaaS, so I felt that the blog should be my thoughts, nothing more. So you could say minalism was born not due to an affinity for it, but rather a disdain for unnecessary space-eating chaos.

Next, performance was important. Now, it’s no billion row challenge, but I dislike when I go on a blog or personal site and there’s noticeable lag for scrolls or pageloads. Astro was able to help me achieve this. Seriously, run my Lighthouse report. 100s all around baby.

I also wanted to remove any barriers that would prevent me from writing. Over-engineering was one obstacle. Being somewhat of a perfectionist, I had struggled in the past - opening up my editor to write a new post but getting lost in changing the responsiveness of my navbar, changing the copy on my footer, nitpicking title font weight. I did not want to be distracted. Simplicity, combined with a system that converts markdown to blog posts allows me to open up my laptop, dump my thoughts, push the commit, and voila.

That’s not to say I didn’t want it to look nice. I do think it looks attractive, and I’ve spent a nonzero amount of time to make that happen. I wanted it to be tasteful though. A modern but somewhat unconventional color scheme (that I’ll probably change like once a month, but that’s exciting and takes 2 minutes). I think the large amount of blank space is rather refreshing, and makes you focus on what I want you to focus on. But I can’t say I don’t love the shade of this accent. If you’re on laptop, try navigating back and forth from this article to the home page. Really pay attention to the page load. Smooth isn’t it? All thanks to Astro View Transitions.

I’ve really enjoyed writing my blog so far. I’m thinking of adding email notifications for new posts, but I don’t know yet. Thanks to all who read.