richardkern.nz

This is the site you are on, so the quickest review is to look around it. It is a personal blog and a small portfolio, and it is also the first project in that portfolio, which is either tidy or circular depending on your mood.

I built it on the same stack I use for real work: Next.js and Payload CMS on top of Postgres, styled with Tailwind, deployed through Coolify to a VPS I manage myself, with media on Cloudflare R2. The overlap is deliberate. It runs the same rails as the Westgate Baptist site I look after, so a decision made on one pays off on the other, and the personal site is where I get to make the mistakes first.

The look is one I think of as cover and pages: a single paper surface for the writing, with charcoal kept for the parts that are structural or technical, the homepage spine, the code blocks, the footer. Over the top is a logbook layer, where everything about a post, its number, dates, tags and filenames, is set in mono, and everything in a post is set in serif. It has a real dark mode, not a filter over a light theme.

The whole thing is open source; the repository link is above. It is more site than a personal blog strictly needs, which is the point. It was built to be built, not only to be finished.