Drumroll please ... I have created my own blog 😍 https://www.antidoteblog.com/

A couple of weeks ago, I complained about Paragraph and how it destroyed custom CSS and effectively ownership along with it. I spend quite some time to have the blog fit my taste only for it to be taken away. So I was quite devastated when my blog was pressed back to uniformity. But then I thought: Why not code it from scratch? 

So I did that with Ghost, Cursor and Vercel. I realise this is nothing special, but here are a couple of details I am proud of: (Also I am very aware that for everything there is likely a 10x better solution but this is the best my 2-neuron-brain can come up with)


1. Design: A LOT of thought went into this. I wanted to create a blog thats fun, different and interesting. Much of the colour palette is inspired by 80s / 90s Sony design and retro video games.

Thoughts on antidoteblog.com

Agents and Intents @NEAR | prev investments and BD 
@ZkSync, New Enterprise Associates and Balderton Capital

2. The home screen: 

I wanted a home screen that has an experimental and digital vibe to it AND that looked cool in desktop and mobile view. So I essentially created two interfaces. For desktop you hover over tiles to select them. For mobile you swipe across tiles and click on the expanded one (a riff on coverflow and horrible for Cursor to figure out). 

The cut off top left corners are supposed to represent SD cards. A sheer nightmare that were created with SVG parts because it was the only way to cut off a corner diagonally and have constant outlines around it.

If you click on the Article, there is a pixellated border between the Article image and the background to give it a glitchy look. The first letter of the Article is done in a different font to give it a magazine aesthetic while creating a clash with its pixel font 🤌

3 TAGS: I wanted to maintain the maximum compatibility with Ghost without just having to sacrifice an ounce when it comes to design. Still, I want to piggyback on their membership features and more importantly - just write on the ghost website and press Publish and have everything handled. Each article has a key colour (the same as the tiles). And also - for provenance - a link to the .md file postet on Arweave. This is all handled with Tags in the Ghost system.

4 The Antidote mascot. Gengar remains my favourite Pokemon and it is the mascot of my blog. You can find its avatar in the header (with a difference layer effect to emphasize the 'antidote' brand). But also in some characteristics: Gengar is supposed to sabotage the website a little. This is why parts of the titles tiles are encrypted and will only be decrypted when you hover over them.

Even more so, at the end of the article, Gengar actually provides you with the best reasons why my arguments in my article are WRONG. This is LLM generated (With Nous Hermes). I thought it was fun to have my articles sensechecked by AI.

5: Left to do:

There are still some UI bugs and most importantly, the sign up flow by Ghost is a bit cumbersome and non-intuitive. It wants you to create an account but then also tells you to accept the subscription via email. Why make it so high friction? I will likely use their API to have a better sign up flow.

6 Please sign up:

Still, I would really appreciate it if you signed up and giv eme some details on how you like the design. I intend to write a lot more in the future.

In any case, it was really fun building something even if it was a trivial blog. 

1. Design: A LOT of thought went into this. I wanted to create a blog thats fun, different and interesting. Much of the colour palette is inspired by 80s / 90s Sony design and retro video games. 