Rebuilding the Site

A while back I wrote about revising the site — reshaping it around projects and curation. This time the change went deeper: I rebuilt the foundation underneath it.

For years Blot served me well. It did the one thing I most wanted from a tool: it stayed out of the way. I wrote in plain files, and pages appeared. But over time I kept meeting its edges — how the home page was arranged, how photographs were presented, how the pieces related to one another. I wanted more control, without giving up the things that made Blot feel right in the first place: local markdown files, a simple workflow, writing first.

So the site now runs on Astro, hosted on Netlify, with every image living on Cloudflare R2 — a store I’d started earlier and have now committed to fully.

The move only felt safe because of a principle I’d settled on before touching anything: the content is the durable asset, and the tools are replaceable. The site is still just a folder of markdown and a set of image URLs. Astro renders it today; if Astro disappeared tomorrow, the writing and the photographs would be untouched. That reframing turned what might have been a risky rebuild into something closer to swapping the frame around work that stays put.

The benefits are already showing. The home page keeps the look and feel I’d arrived at, but now does more — surfacing the projects alongside the most recent journal entries, so the site reads as a body of work rather than a stream. Search is better. And selecting any photograph on a page or post now opens it in a clean lightbox, the image given room to breathe against everything else. Beneath that, the images are resized on the fly rather than shipped at full weight — which matters more on a photography site than almost anything else.

A rebuild like this would once have meant weeks of fiddly work. This time it didn’t. Much of the design and development was accelerated by AI — Claude Cowork for the planning and the content migration, Claude Code for the build itself. That let me stay in the part I actually care about, deciding what the site should be and how the photographs should sit, while the mechanical work moved fast underneath me.

There’s more still on the workbench: a lighter feed for quicker, less deliberate posts, and eventually a way to publish from anywhere. But the structure I wanted is in place, and it fits the way I actually work.

As before, the site will always be a work in progress. What’s different now is that the ground under it is mine to shape.