New website, time for a change (again)
So here we are again. Almost exactly five years after the last one, the new website has launched, and apparently this is just what I do every five years now. See you in 2031.
Last time the change came after the year we’d all had. This time it came after a few quiet years on here; life got in the way for a while, and the site sat still while everything around it moved. Getting back into building things this year made the old place feel like someone else’s house, so: time for a change.
What’s changed
The short version is that this site now practises what it preaches. The old build ran on Tailwind with a Node pipeline; the new one is a single hand-written CSS file, no build step, no node_modules, using all the modern CSS I wrote about in You might not need a CSS framework anymore.
The type might feel familiar to long-time visitors: headings and body are set in Iowan Old Style, the same bookish serif the very first r3id site wore years ago. Everything old is new again. Windows and Android friends get Palatino and Georgia, which keep the warmth.
And it wasn’t just a repaint; it was a proper clean-up. The whole back catalogue got sorted: the evergreen posts kept, the stale ones refreshed for 2026 (Rails 8, Tailwind v4, Ruby 4.0 and friends), the genuinely expired ones retired, and everything retagged into the tidy filter on the notes page. Reading times are back, code blocks finally have proper syntax highlighting, work projects have real pages now, and the whole thing remains free of analytics, cookies and tracking, as it always has been.
Plans moving forward
Last time I said the revamp was the start of some exciting things, and then promised an analytics product called Biscuit was coming “over the coming months”.
Time to be honest: Biscuit never happened. The domain lapsed, the dashboard never shipped, and the coming months quietly became the coming years. I’m mentioning it rather than burying it because I still love the idea; a small, privacy-first alternative to the analytics giants feels more needed in 2026, not less. It stays on the bench, and the bench is real this time.
Because this time the plans section comes with receipts. This year I’ve shipped Log Book on the Mac and two iOS apps, with three more on the way: ReptileCare is launching imminently, and Money and Tenths are in testing at the kitchen table and the kart track respectively. The plan from here is simple: keep shipping the apps, keep writing the notes as I go, and let this site do what it was always meant to do, which is showcase the things I actually make.
The glasses stay. Some things are load-bearing.
And if you’re after something meatier than site news, the ink is barely dry on Building and securing a GraphQL API in Rails. Right, back to the kart track.