I Redesigned This Blog

I rebuilt the blog section of this site this week. Here's the new look:

The old version had a flaw I'd stopped noticing — which is the polite way of saying I'd been ignoring it. Eight of my eleven posts were marked "featured," so the page was eight identical full-width rows, each with a thumbnail stranded in its own field of whitespace. When everything is special, nothing is.

The new layout gives each element one job. The freshest featured post leads as a hero — full image, room to breathe. Everything below is a tidy card grid: thumbnail on top, a colored tag pill, title, a one-line lead. Featured posts keep a small badge so the distinction still reads, but they've stopped elbowing each other for attention.

Posts without an image don't punch a hole in the grid anymore. The card falls back to a tag-colored block instead of a broken thumbnail, and the post header does the same. So a quick text-only post — the kind I now publish straight from Claude — still looks like someone meant it.

Small stuff, all of it. But the difference between a personal site that looks maintained and one that looks abandoned is usually a hundred small things, and this was a handful of them.