Migrating My Old Blog to This New Site
so here's the thing. i had blogs. like, multiple. one on Medium that i posted to twice and forgot about. one on a WordPress site that i thought was gonna be my "brand" or whatever. and junioakarda.com — my old domain that's been sitting there collecting dust, with posts from when i was fresh out of college and thought i had things figured out.
all of them dead. different platforms, different eras of me, all abandoned.
and the domain was coming up for renewal. i sat there staring at it like... do i even want this anymore? does this name still feel like me?
nah. it didn't.
finding juuni.dev
i wanted something shorter. something that didn't feel like it belonged to college-me. and juuni.dev was just... available. six letters, .dev extension, felt right. i didn't overthink it. i just bought it.
for five years.
yeah. five years. not one year like i usually do where i forget to renew and the domain dies again. five years because honestly i'm tired of starting over. this is the one. i'm committing to this.
building it from scratch
i could've used a template. i could've just thrown up a Next.js starter and called it a day. but nah, i wanted to build something that actually feels like me. the whole design is what i'm calling Kinetic Brutalism — hard shadows, no rounded corners, bold fonts, things that move. it's loud and i love it.
Next.js 15, MDX for blog posts so each one is just a file i can write in, Tailwind for styling, Framer Motion coz static sites are boring. deployed on Vercel. the whole thing is exactly how i want it and that feels really good actually.
going through old posts
this part was weird. reading stuff i wrote in 2021, 2022... man. some of it was so cringe i couldn't even finish reading. but some of it? surprisingly honest. like i could feel past-me trying to figure things out, writing it down as a way to process.
not everything made it here. a lot of posts were too specific to a moment that already passed, or just... not good enough. but the ones that survived, i cleaned them up, reformatted them in MDX, and now they live here. feels like they finally have a proper home instead of floating around dead domains.
why i actually care this time
i've done the thing where you buy a domain, get excited for a week, and then never touch it again. we all have. but this time it's different because i'm not doing this for a portfolio or to look professional or whatever.
i just want a place to think out loud. write about code, write about life, write about random stuff that's on my mind. all in one place. in my voice, not some polished version of me.
bought the domain for five years. that's how serious i am. :D
the site's live. the blog works. old posts are here. now i just gotta keep writing.
i'm in. let's go.