mikevdv.dev - NXT

I've talked about doing a full rebuild of mikevdv.dev for years now. The site’s minimalist aesthetic - which was quite a statement when I launched it - has become so commonplace that I am regularly asked which UI library I use. Between that and the tech debt, ignoring the need for a rebuild was killing my interest in writing. Not ideal.

The question was then, how I'd handle a rebuild...

The previous version of the site had cost me close to £40 a month due to the database, all the lambdas and the frontend application hosting. Given my move to self hosting much of what I need in life, I decided that any replacement should be easily self hosted. I ended up choosing Ghost CMS with a custom frontend written using Dioxus. This would give me the most flexibility to experiment on my site using Rust while having an opinionated structure for the backend blogging platform.

Choosing Ghost CMS would also give me access to a web based post editor which had become more important since my move to Which? where I'm regularly required to be in London.

So that's the tech choices - but what about the design? If the old version of the site was minimal, then I wanted the new version to be so stylised that it bordered on obnoxious. In a world where everyone was using AI to create Slop, I wanted this new design to be Hand Crafted Garbage™.

The body of the site is 4:3 when on desktop and in the default small size, roughly only 300px wide on my 5k resolution monitor. The page content itself is still minimalist because at that size, anything more would be unintelligible. I added a fullscreen button for those with poor eyesight but, even with this enabled, the styling and 4:3 viewport is maintained.

Theming the site like a vintage computer made of ageing plastic, while running entirely on Rust + WebAssembly is the sort of ridiculous irony that makes me happy.

On Mobile, The site expands to fill the screen while continuing to look like a forgotten edition of Palm Pilot. Perfect for reading blogs on the go.

You'll notice that at the time of writing, this post is only available on the nxt subdomain of mikevdv.dev. You can consider this an alpha while I sort out RSS feeds and comments for the new platform.

Michael