This new site represents my favorite habits: trying tools I don’t strictly need, and dreaming about colorful places I love.
Starting with the tool… Rather than continue with my perpetually unfinished and broken WordPress site, I’m going with Astro. Over the last few years I’ve gotten used to headless setups where design and content are separate. And WordPress now feels so clunky to me. I have to fight that Gutenberg content + design combo. Astro seems to be the exciting new thing, it’s lightweight, and it works well with AI, which matters for how I work now. I’m not fully comfortable with it yet, but I can’t wait to experiement.
One thing I do like is how it uses Markdown, the same format I’ve started to use for everything else, including my second brain, due to LLMs. And I can use the second brain, which contains highlights of projects that I work on, to draft posts for case studies. The downside being that I am torn on having AI generate drafts for me; it’s useful, and oh so tempting when I’m in a hurry, but the AI slop factor makes me crave human writing. More thoughts about with this later. It’s a dilemma!
As to the second part, the color. I live in Seattle. And while the summers here are like a dream — we’ve had a few dreamy weeks now of high 70s, low 80s — this can make the tourist or newbie resident unaware of the absolute drudgery to come. I don’t want to face it right now, but a voice is reminding me the lovely shade of rotating greys of winter. Quite heart-wrenchingly lovely. Seasonal Affective Disorder lovely. And oddly enough — I’m sure it’s entirely unrelated — I am drawn to places I’ve visited awash in color: Curaçao, Southern France, and the Italian Riviera. Terracotta, turquoise, coral, sun-yellow. I’m going to need this site to power me up in the winter.
One thing about these personal sites, I never know what to put in them and I destroy them all of the time. This is primary a career-based site, though I may dabble in non-career areas. I’m hoping this “Jon Bostwick” sticks around, and the lure of the cheerful colors and exciting new framework may help me to keep it going. Cheers!