So, it finally happened. After many years on WordPress, this blog now lives on Next.js and Vercel. And it has a new theme too. Lets talk about it, shall we?

Why move

WordPress was fine. It worked. But it was also slow, plugin-heavy, and I was paying for hosting that I never really used for anything. The admin was nice for writing posts inside the browser but, honestly, I dont write that much. So why pay for that all the time?

Vercel hobby tier is free, Next.js is fast, and I can ship a new design without fighting a theme builder. That was enough reason.

The new theme: terminal

I wanted something different. Most personal sites look the same now — big serif heading, three column cards, dark mode toggle, the same Tailwind look. I am tired of it.

So I went with a terminal theme. Phosphor amber on near-black by default. JetBrains Mono everywhere. ASCII drawn boxes. A status bar at the bottom like Vim. A ~/posts/ tree on the left that lists categories. j and k to navigate posts on the home page, / to search. Nerd stuff. I love it :D

If you dont love it, no problem. There are 10 themes built in:

  • phosphor (default, amber)
  • solarized
  • gruvbox
  • dracula
  • nord
  • tokyo‑night
  • monokai
  • one
  • catppuccin
  • rose‑pine

Each has a dark and a light mode. Use the theme: dropdown in the top right and switch around till you find one you like. It is saved in your browser so it stays.

What was kept

All the old URLs still work. /life/happy-new-year-2026/, /hacks/…, /info/…, /tag/… — nothing should be broken. If you have bookmarked something, it will still load. Categories, tags, password protected posts — all of them came along.

RSS is still at /rss and /feed for your reader.

What was lost

Comments are not wired up yet. I have an idea to add Giscus (GitHub backed comments) later, but for now the old imported comments are still rendered at the bottom of posts that had them. You just cant add new ones for the moment. If this annoys you, mail me.

The WordPress admin is gone, obviously. From here on the blog is written as markdown files in the repo. Which means a slightly slower workflow to ship a post but, given how often I write, that is not a real concern :P

How fast?

The home page now loads in under a second. PageSpeed gives it 98 on mobile. The whole site is statically generated where possible and served from Vercel's CDN. The old WordPress used to take 3 to 4 seconds for the same page on a fresh load. Even better, my Vercel bill is zero because the free tier covers a site this small easily.

Whats next

I want to write more this year. The yearly New Year post is a habit I dont want to break. But I also want to share more small things in between — the linux fix that took 3 hours, the rides, the small life things. Lets see if the new home helps with that, or if I will still find a way to abandon the blog :P

If you find anything broken, let me know. mail at mithun@mithun.co, or DM me on twitter @mantlecurve.

Njoy :)