Blog rethink

The post layout is a 3-column grid inside a max-w-7xl container, next to a 320 px sidebar that is always open on desktop. The article takes 2 of the 3 columns, and Tailwind Typography's prose class caps it at about 65 characters.

• 65ch is right for paragraphs, wrong for code, tables, diagrams and the Svelte apps, which all inherit the same cap.
• Nothing can break out of the column: no wide code blocks, no full-width figures.
• On mobile the cap is fine; the problem is desktop only.

The fix is usually not a wider paragraph, but a layout where text stays readable and code and figures may go wider.

What we saw on the home page and a post page:

• Two type voices. Card and featured titles are heavy and large (48 px, black); the post title is light (30 px, thin). They look like different sites.
• Category colours carry no meaning. Engineering is yellow, Drupal cyan, Musing lavender, FlowDrop pink. Pastels on heavy black borders, unrelated to the rest.
• Three box styles. Brutalist 4 px black cards, a gradient featured hero, and DaisyUI's thin wireframe theme on buttons and pagination.
• The same list twice. "Recent Post" sits in the sidebar and as the home page grid.
• The featured post is stale. The home hero picks the first post tagged feature, which is from March, while newer posts sit below it.
• Cards are titles only. No summary, no reading time, no image, so every card weighs the same.

The theme is DaisyUI's wireframe preset with overrides. There are no design tokens of our own, so every partial makes its own choices.

The site is called D34dBlog, not Shibin Das. What it says about the author:

• Author box under every post: "Drupal Developer. Spice Dealer. Prying on Information Architecture nowadays." Links to GitHub and Instagram only.
• About page (written 2024): career story from embedded engineering to Drupal PM and freelancing, ending at Factorial.

What it does not say: tech lead at Factorial, creator of FlowDrop, Atelier CMS and Sutram, maintainer of Revision Graph, conference speaker (DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026, the talks record on drupal.org), drupal.org profile. Those projects appear only as post categories. A visitor coming from a talk or a GitHub repo cannot see that body of work in one place.

On a post page there are four things competing above the fold: the dark sidebar with nav and recent posts, the breadcrumb, the article, and the support box. The support box has the heaviest border on the page, so it wins.

• No table of contents on long posts (a toc shortcode exists but has to be added by hand).
• No reading time, no series navigation even though posts have series frontmatter.
• The category label and tags sit at the very end of the post.
• The home page gives every post equal weight, so there is no "start here" for a new reader.

We loaded eight pages (home, post list, a tag page, three posts, the EVM app, about) in a scripted browser at 1440 px, 390 px and in dark mode, and read the computed styles. The numbers below come from that run on 23 Oct 2026, not from the source.

• The brand font never loads. Hind Madurai is preloaded, but the fontFamily setting sits inside the DaisyUI theme object, where Tailwind ignores it. Every page renders in the system font: SF on a Mac, Segoe on Windows, Roboto on Android. The site looks different on every reader's machine, and the preload is wasted bandwidth.
• Hierarchy is inverted on posts. The title (H1) is 30 px regular; every section heading (H2) is 30 px bold, so the first H2 looks more important than the title.
• No H1 at all on /posts/ and tag pages (they start at H2). Two H1s on the EVM simulator page.
• Small, crowded lists. 14 px is the most common size on the home page; dates and labels are all the same 14 px with no weight or colour step between them.
• Paragraphs themselves are good: 18 px on 32 px line height.

One post page uses this many distinct values:

The base is a clean monochrome (DaisyUI wireframe). The pastels and heavy black borders were layered on per partial, which is why the home page and post page look like two sites.

• Every post overflows on phones. The page measures 449 px on a 390 px screen. The post grid's single column grows to fit the widest code line (grid-cols-1 without min-w-0), so paragraphs, the title and the byline are wider than the screen. Readers have to scroll sideways on every line. The home page overflows the same way.
• Below 1024 px the sidebar becomes a top bar, which works. The support box and recent posts move under the article.
• This is the most urgent UI bug: most link traffic from LinkedIn and chat opens on phones.

• Dark mode doesn't work. The config asks for DaisyUI's night theme as dark, but registers the dark theme under the name dark. With the OS set to dark, the page stays white.
• No skip link past the sidebar's 10+ links for keyboard and screen-reader users.
• Contrast is fine: body text is near-black at 80% on white, the sidebar is light grey on near-black.
• All images have alt text.
• Pages are light. 133–143 KB and 5–6 requests for home and posts, no third-party trackers (Umami is self-hosted). The EVM app page is 209 KB. One maths post (EVM, with KaTeX) is 1.36 MB, ten times a normal post.

Worth keeping in any rebuild: the light pages, the 18/32 paragraph rhythm, the monochrome base, the byline with avatar and date, and no tracking.

Hugo itself is fast and the posts are plain Markdown, which is worth keeping. The pain sits in the joins: Svelte 3 (two majors behind) compiled by a separate toolchain, a CSS step that races Hugo when run in parallel, and a Cloudflare Worker setup (wrangler.jsonc, build:cf) that is no longer used.

Where it really runs. Every push to main builds ghcr.io/d34dman/d34dblog:main (Hugo build, then nginx 1.25). A small server runs that container. Analytics is the self-hosted Umami. The repo's AGENTS.md still calls Cloudflare primary and Docker legacy, so an agent working on the blog today starts from the wrong picture.

Checked on the home page and /posts/engineering/upgrade-path-is-a-product-decision/:

• No Open Graph or Twitter card tags. Links shared on LinkedIn, Mattermost or Slack show no title card or image.
• No structured data. No JSON-LD for Article, Person or BlogPosting, so search engines don't connect posts to the author.
• Duplicate head tags. head.html and baseof.html both print the meta description and viewport. Pages without a description get an empty one.
• Thin sitemap. 96 URLs, of which 51 are tag pages and 8 category pages, against about 25 posts.
• robots.txt has no Sitemap line.
• Two hosts. d34dman.com answers 200 instead of redirecting to www: the Traefik router serves both hosts (the canonical tag softens this).
• No llms.txt (404), on a blog that has a post about llms.txt.
• Site title "D34dBlog" in every <title>, so search results never show the author's name.

Today a reader or an AI agent can only click and scroll. Sutram, Shibin's own package, turns what a web app can do into commands: people type them into a console, agents call them as WebMCP tools in the reader's own browser session.

On a blog that could mean commands such as search drupal, open series flowdrop, toc, cite, evm simulate --bac 100000. The blog becomes a working showcase for Sutram, and agents reading the site get structured tools instead of scraping HTML. The open question is how far to go: a console on an otherwise static site, or a site built around it.