Story of redesigning my blog
In recent days, following the burst of energy and renewed productivity I experienced, I decided to redesign my blog. The previous blog design, based on a skeuomorphic style and a notebook-like appearance, dated back to 2016. Although I still found it beautiful, it no longer supported my current ideas and way of thinking. Besides, it had been exactly 20 years since that teenage boy wrote his first blog post, so a proper spring cleaning on this anniversary was more than welcome.
In my opinion, progress in life comes not from adding, but from removing the unnecessary. I applied this approach throughout the design and implementation process. On this website, you won’t find anything beyond what the user wants to see. The focus is entirely on content.
In the state of distraction and reduced attention caused by social networks and the overwhelming amount of news, good, bad, and ugly, every millisecond of the reader's focus has high value, and I didn’t want to waste it on nonsense. While reading any part of the blog, the only motion your eyes need is to read from top to bottom, not left to right.
I don’t know if you’re as tired of the web’s pathetic state as I am, but I really can’t tolerate this amount of bloatware anymore. The homepage of this blog, despite having icons, is only 7.85kB in total size and renders on the server in less than 120 milliseconds. With a Content Delivery Network cache, this number drops to below 5 milliseconds (depending on your internet speed).
The extremely fast page loading might make you think that content is loaded via AJAX, but that’s not the case. A key condition for this redesign was no use of JavaScript. Honestly, I really hate it.
I didn’t use any CMS. Everything was written entirely by myself in the beautiful PHP language so that my absolute freedom would not be constrained by any system’s capabilities. The ridiculously fast load times and small size were only possible because of this approach.
My early blog versions were in Azerbaijani Turkish, later versions in Persian, resulting only in isolation. Recently, many friends and colleagues didn’t know either language, which pushed me to expand my audience and write in a language anyone in the world could understand. The main challenge was translating 20 years of past posts, which was one of the hardest and most exhausting tasks I’ve ever done, but truly worth it.
This blog is no longer a simple blog. It’s a place that will contain everything I want to share: from newly discovered songs to projects I’m working on to quotes I found inspiring. Everything is here.
Many of us forget that disabled people may face various challenges, such as limited vision, difficulty using a mouse, or trouble typing on a keyboard. Ensuring high accessibility in every piece of content, though very time-consuming and exhausting, was worth it to allow friends with disabilities to easily access and enjoy my writings.
A detail that may not matter to others but was important to me: when someone looks at the blog’s source code, they should still see beauty, not a massive pile of stuff nobody can make sense of. You can see the result yourself by right-clicking → view source.
As an experimental option, I provide the ability to view the entire blog content in TXT (accessible via curl). If you’re interested in archiving or offline reading, you can also download the PDF version. Simply open it, print it (Save it as PDF or literally), and it allows you to access the content even without the internet. I also made a RAW version (remember old dumb-phones?), check it out.
And that's it. This is the result. Please share your feedback. I really appreciate it.
Araz Gholami - 16 September 2025 Share: arazgholami.com/a-fresh-start-a-timeless-redesign.raw - Saber ** at *11 October 2025*: Well said. Simplicity goes far ...