A Weekend Facelift for the Blog
Writing a blog isn’t quite the same as writing a diary — I do both, and I’ve been thinking about the difference lately.
A diary is for yourself. It can be messy, free-wheeling, whatever you feel like writing.
A blog should be a bit more intentional. Plenty of my older posts read like diary entries too, which isn’t wrong — but it’s better to have a point or a theme. Otherwise people finish reading and still don’t know what you were trying to say, walk away with nothing, and may not come back. Nobody wants to read a blog that goes nowhere.
Content matters most. But so does making it easy for someone to sit down and actually read. That’s why this blog has stayed fairly plain and simple. Over the weekend, I decided to add a few things that felt necessary.
An AI entry point
We’re in the AI era, and staying curious still matters. For some basic AI concepts and demos, I spun up a separate blog that was almost entirely built and filled by AI. Then, on this “old-school” blog, I added a colorful AI entry in the sidebar.
Click through, and you’re in another world.
Many rounds with Cursor
Getting there took quite a few back-and-forths with the AI client. The first designs were pretty ugly. After installing a few open-source UI design skills — design-taste-frontend, frontend-design, impeccable, and the like — and asking it to refine the layout, style, and color, things finally started to look decent.
There are a lot of skills; you don’t need to read every one in detail. Skim them, note what each is good at, and pick the right one for the moment. For example, when I want to restyle the blog, I can default to impeccable + gsap and write that into a Cursor rule, so half a dozen design skills don’t all jump in at once and step on each other.
These few days of “renovating” the blog taught me a lot: clearer taste for what I want, and a better feel for collaborating with AI — not dumping the whole job on it, but giving direction, setting boundaries, then choosing among the results.
If you have a minute, try that glowing entry on the left. Happy to chat.