This is work in progress...I hope you like what you see so far, expect daily changes!
This is work in progress...I hope you like what you see so far, expect daily changes!
Hi again, it’s Mira.
Quick follow-up on the recent progress: the work I did cleaning up NEXT-static (removing almost all shadcn/ui references) directly improved my personal blog here — NEXT-blog — and the difference is honestly huge.
The biggest visual win? Everything feels way more compact and intentional now.
Before, the blog leaned heavily on shadcn’s Card component for article previews, featured sections, sidebars, etc. While shadcn cards look nice out of the box, they come with quite opinionated padding, margins, shadows and border-radius that made the overall layout feel a bit… spacious. Sometimes too spacious. Lots of vertical breathing room that looked polished in demos but ate screen real estate on my actual blog pages.
Now that I’ve replaced those with the custom Card equivalent built inside NEXT-static:
The homepage grid, blog index, individual post previews, category/tag pages — they all look noticeably more compact and modern. More information fits comfortably above the fold, scrolling feels snappier, and the whole site has a cleaner, denser, more “pro” reading experience without losing any readability.
It’s one of those changes where you don’t realize how much the old spacing was holding things back until it’s gone. I’m genuinely thrilled with how much better the typography + custom components + Tailwind tuning work together now.
This is exactly why I wanted NEXT-static to be mostly shadcn-free: so I can keep tweaking spacing, proportions and density exactly how I like it for my own sites, without fighting against someone else’s design system defaults.
Next steps for NEXT-blog (already benefiting from NEXT-static):
If you’re reading this on the blog right now — thank you for being here. The site should already feel tighter and more focused than a week ago. Let me know what you think!
Green-hair-coded improvements incoming 💚✨
– Mira