Building zlokapa.com

The Design

I might have one of those attention disorder things. Or a degree of it at least. Whenever I start a new project, I immediately start thinking about design systems and components. Every part of the interface had to be thought about. I almost never had the time to properly do it, but still I thought about it a lot.

On the other hand, I always liked sites where every page is chaotic, designed differently. Different layouts, different colours, fonts, all of it.

When CSS grids came, I thought “This is it! This is how I’m going to build my site.” Grid gives me everything I wanted, both the structure and the option to place anything anywhere on the page. The main idea was to have a single grid all over the screen so that I can play around with any element on the page.

10 or so years later and here I am, designed a site without any “design” where all pages are the same. I wanted to have the content first before adding anything else. Themes, animations and other bells and whistles will come later.

But at least I have a grid.

The Tech Stack

I’m in the process of gathering all my files from various services and apps. For example, I used a couple of different writing applications and my articles, notes and journals were spread between them. All those apps had something I liked, from nice UI to geotagging of my journal entries, but I figured those things aren’t crucial to me as I thought. I decided to go back to the basics and to the only thing I really need, to store text. That’s why I’ going with markdown files, which are pure-text with just a pinch of structure and style. Whatever happens, I can move files more quickly than to migrate a database to another content management system.

The next step in owning my data is to publish it here, then syndicate everywhere else and that’s why I have POSSE and RSS implemented.

I choose Next.js because I need the exercise and I plan on adding some backend-y features, but mostly because I need the exercise. For personal projects, I don’t think the stack really matters. Everybody is choosing what ever they are comfortable or want to experiment with and I’m doing the same. And having routing done for me with no extra work is a plus.

The Future

Now I have a proper foundation to experiment with, well anything. I have a backlog full of things I want to try out, to build and to write about, so stay tuned.

Have something to add or comment? Feel free to email me or write me on Bluesky.