Background
This portfolio answers “what have I built.” It does not have the right shape for “what did I learn today” or “here is a short field note from a project.” A separate site made more sense than bolting a blog onto the portfolio and muddying both.
The design constraint was specific: Toddified had to feel like the same person made it without feeling like the same site. Visitors moving between the two should recognize the family resemblance and also notice the shift in tone.
What I built
A content-driven static site for short and long writing across five post types — field notes, TILs, deep dives, build logs, and link posts. Markdown content collections, full RSS, tag pages, a timeline archive, and a homepage that surfaces recent and featured posts.
The codebase is Astro 5 with Tailwind v4 and the typography plugin. There is no client-side framework and no hydration. Every interaction on the site — scroll reveals, card hovers, the blinking cursor — runs on CSS alone.
How the design connects
Shared with the portfolio: the same paper background, the same stone neutrals, the same SVG grain overlay at low opacity, the same spring-eased card hovers, the same body typography.
Distinct to Toddified: a monospace display face for headings, a teal accent (OKLCH hue 155, where the portfolio uses blue at hue 250), and a light-mode terminal vocabulary running through the UI. The hero is set in monospace and ends with a blinking underscore cursor. Tags read like command prompts. Metadata strips borrow from terminal output without trying to be a fake terminal.
The decision to stay in light mode mattered. Most “terminal-inspired” designs reach for a dark canvas reflexively. A paper background with teal-tinted code blocks reads calmer, sits next to the portfolio without a jarring switch, and is easier on the eyes for the kind of reading the site is for.
Why it matters
The interesting work was finding the smallest set of decisions that would carry the family resemblance and the new identity at the same time. Two color hues, one new typeface for headings, and a small vocabulary of terminal-flavored UI elements — that turned out to be enough. Nothing about the underlying architecture is novel. The site is a static Astro build that lives on Cloudflare Pages and gets deployed in seconds. That was the point: keep the engineering boring so the writing and the design can do the work.