What Changed on My Site (May 2025 – May 2026)
#Site
I do not ship a formal release every time I tweak this site, but looking back at a year of commits, there is a lot more than I expected. Here is a concise roundup of what changed on my site between 4 May 2025 and 22 May 2026.
New content
- Blog: Design Videos: WWDC25
- Blog: Why You Need a Just-for-Fun Hobby
- Blog: Designers Have a Superpower (But Use It Wisely)
- Book notes: The Anthology of Balaji, 8 Rules of Love
- TL;DR summaries added across many book notes
- Now page updated several times — focus, reading list, live status
- Apple Fitness awards page added (later removed)
Features
- Search on blog and book notes rebuilt — no jQuery, shared search filter component
- Related books: shuffle, ratings in the sidebar, responsive grid layout
- “Open to work” badge on About, Works, and Now page titles
- Works: section renamed to Portfolio Gallery; Tool Stack with new tools
robotsmeta tag for finer SEO control- LinkedIn link in the footer
- Site version bumped to XVII; collections and config cleaned up
Design & UI
- Navbar: mobile expand/collapse, animated height, simplified layout
- Typography: Instrument Serif → Caveat for headings; Geist Mono for tags and countdown; fonts self-hosted (no Google Fonts)
- Page titles use SVG icons instead of emoji; consistent titles and descriptions site-wide
- Landing: new profile image, header and layout tweaks,
btn-magicgradient animation - Works and “Latest blog posts” sections restyled
- Book notes: cleaner layout (author line removed), themed borders, TL;DR callout switched to grey
- Timeline and baseline SVG alignment improvements
- Theme toggler icons refreshed
- Button hover transitions and list spacing polish
Performance & hosting
- Vercel cache headers for assets and HTML
- Preconnect and preload in
<head>;fetchpriorityon the author image - UTF-8 encoding and HTML compression settings tightened
Removed & simplified
- Referrals page removed
- Awards data, emoji helpers, and unused includes/SVGs removed
- Fitness awards page and old images removed
- Footer markup simplified
- Blog cards no longer show a description snippet