What I'm Changing After A Year Of Blogging

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Writing for the world is something which has ebbed and flowed for me over time. I’ve always liked sharing my thoughts, starting with websites all the way back when I was a kid. In times when I sustained it, I had various “blog”-like things for technical projects which would often veer into sharing personal beliefs as well.

It’s been a year since my latest attempt at what I expect to be a lifelong endeavor. So I’ve been reflecting on how it’s gone, and that’s led me to make some decisions on how I want to rework things going forward.

Raising the importance of articles#

I have two goals with my writing:

I want the freedom to write what I want and put as much or as little effort into it as I like.
I care a lot about presenting the work I think is good in the best way possible to readers.

Although it might not seem like it, these goals are somewhat in conflict with each other. Sometimes I’ll write up TILs or low-effort posts which may not be that interesting to most people, and I don’t want these mixed up with my best work in the eyes of readers encountering me for the first time.

I’m by no means unique in this; lots of internet writers have the same dilemma and take different approaches to dealing with it. Two options I considered are:

High-effort content on the blog, low-effort content on social media.
Separating content on the blog into high-effort (articles, essays) and low-effort (notes, snippets, TILs, etc.).

I don’t like option 1 because I don’t particularly like social media. I was off it completely for years and have begrudgingly come back because it’s useful for sharing things with people, but it’s not something I enjoy. More importantly, I want everything I write to live on my own site, under my control, rather than scattered across platforms I don’t own.

Instead I’ve taken option 2: I’ve decided to more strongly separate articles and notes from each other.

Knock-on effects on Substack#

The main way I’m doing this: I’m no longer going to be sending out notes over email on Substack. I initially conceived of Substack as a “newsletter” of sorts, rounding up everything new on the blog since the last edition. But over time I’ve come to dislike the effect this has: I don’t feel like sending out a newsletter until a high-effort article is ready to go with it. If nothing is ready, I end up just waiting, sometimes for more than a month. Why? Because I don’t want a newsletter edition which doesn’t put my best self forward.

This might all be a me thing: I don’t know how many of my newsletter readers mind if I send them low-effort things. But I feel bad about it, and I think that’s enough for me to not do it.

So instead I plan on reworking it from a newsletter into an articles-only feed. When an article is ready, I’ll publish it on the blog and send it out over email on the same day. I’m going to try to do this on Saturdays, though I can’t promise I’ll always manage it.

At the bottom of each email, I’ll also leave a short “since I last sent you an article, I published thoughts on X, Y and Z”. But it’ll be a one line footnote, not the full content as I do today.

If folks do want to subscribe to everything, my suggestion (see the subscribe page) is to use RSS or an RSS-to-email service. Setting one up on my side would require either managing emails myself (which I think would be painful), manually copying posts to Substack (the tedium disincentivizes me from writing the short posts), or paying for a second email service alongside Substack (which I don’t want to do unless someone will actually use it). If you want everything from me in your inbox, reach out as it will help me decide if I should change my mind.

Site changes#

This also knocks on to the homepage. In my previous redesign post I discussed how I switched to a two-pane dashboard feel and categorized what I wrote into three things: essays, write-ups and notes.

While this was certainly cool and I liked it, I also constantly fell into the trap of having content which could debatably fall into either essays or write-ups. So I’ve erased that distinction: both are now simply articles, reflecting the effort and thought I’ve put into them. Notes remain much the same as before.

I also went back to a single chronological feed, because readers gave me the feedback that they liked seeing at a glance if something was new, rather than scanning across three distinct sections to try to work it out. Articles are still clearly differentiated from notes though: they’re bigger, bolder and have explicit labels.

Unrelatedly, I also spent a bunch of time improving RSS. After dogfooding my own feeds, I realized I had made some real mistakes in the way the feed was generated: content was losing all its links and being shortened. Now full articles are published properly to the feed (though things like sidenotes still won’t look the same as on the website).

Closing thoughts#

All in all, I feel a lot happier after figuring out how I wanted to handle high- vs low-effort content and deciding on making the Substack articles-only. My best work now gets presented in the way I want, and that makes me feel a lot freer to publish the imperfect stuff too.

Homepage Redesign, Light Mode and More

Sat, 06 Dec 2025 23:50:00 +0000

Just a quick note documenting some recent changes to the blog. Nothing groundbreaking, but enough accumulated updates that I wanted to write them down.

Homepage Redesign#

The homepage used to be a chronological list of articles; your classic default blog format. I’ve redesigned it into more of a two-pane “dashboard” feel. The reason? My content is quite varied: I have long essays and technical write-ups but also short TIL or notes posts (like this one!). Having a way to differentiate between them while also scanning across the titles of different types of posts felt really valuable.

I was inspired by this post which I stumbled across.

Light Mode Returns#

A couple of days ago, a reader emailed me and asked if I could add a light mode to the blog because they were reading in a bright environment. Though personally I prefer dark mode, I appreciate not everyone agrees so it made sense to add.

Here’s the funny part: the blog actually had a light mode in its early days. I removed it because maintaining two color schemes with the site generator setup I had (Hugo, PaperMod Theme, Tailwind, custom CSS rules on top) was a significant maintenance cost.

I only endured all this complexity because I thought offloading the theming to someone else meant I could focus on the writing and not turn this into yet another “programming project”. But, unfortunately, I have very strong feelings about how I want things to look. Trying to work within the theme’s extension points while also being opinionated was far more trouble than doing everything myself.

So I ripped out all of that complexity. Stripped Tailwind, simplified the CSS dramatically, went back to basics. Once I did that, adding light mode became trivial. A few CSS variables and a toggle: done!

I briefly considered writing my own static site generator (inspired by this article) but Hugo does the job well enough (if you stay away from its dark corners) that I abandoned the attempt after a few hours.

Typography Refresh#

I also did a bunch of tweaks to the typography:

Fonts: Moved from system fonts to Inter for headings and body content, Source Code Pro for code blocks and monospace usage. Ensures everyone gets the same experience and makes readability consistent; on some machines, I felt legibility suffered if the system font was poor.
Size: Bumped up font sizes throughout. The previous sizing felt a bit hard to read, the new one should be easier on the eye.
Links: Changed how link underlining works by increasing the gap between the letters and underline. Makes the links look clearer. Also links now have a bit of tint when you hover which should make interacting with them nicer.

Lalit Maganti (Tag: Meta)