A Profound Journey has been online since 1995. For the last twenty years it barely changed. This is the rebuild: same writing, new foundations.
A Profound Journey has been online since 1995. For a good stretch of that it was a living site, with articles going up, sections growing, and the design changed whenever I felt like it. Then, somewhere in the mid-2000s, it stopped. The content stayed up and the domain renewed itself every year, but nothing moved. Twenty-odd years of stasis, preserved in classic ASP and hand-cut static HTML.
The premise of the rebuild was that the writing is worth keeping. Years of travel pieces, technology notes, reviews and diary entries add up to a record I did not want to leave rotting in a stack of static files. The aim was not to modernise for its own sake. It was to make the site something I could update again without dreading it.
What changed
The old site ran on classic ASP with static pages and a flat structure that made the smallest edit a chore. The rebuild moves everything onto SiteEngine, the Go stack I use now: Gin, PostgreSQL, and MinIO for the images. Content lives in a proper database, the templates compose, and publishing happens through an admin interface instead of by editing files on disk.
The look is a design system I built from scratch and called the Expedition Ledger. Cream paper, ink, the feel of a cartographer’s notebook, with an off-magenta kept for the working parts: links, navigation, the chrome. Archivo for the display type, Spectral for the body. It is meant to match what the site is, a personal record of travel and technology, written plainly.
What did not change
The voice. The articles read the way they always did, the same opinions and the same digressions, because they are the same articles. Everything was migrated from the archive and restored as close to the original as I could manage. Nothing was rewritten to sound modern. The rebuild is plumbing and paint, not a rewrite.
The site has been going since 1995. With any luck it has another thirty years in it.