I've been meaning to build a website for a while now. The impetus finally came when I was attempting to contribute to Zed last month. My PR didn't make it (zed-industries/zed#46707), but I discovered Marshall Bowers' site in the process. The design felt intentional without being overwrought, exactly the kind of clean aesthetic I'd been hoping for.

There was just one problem: it's not open source. Marshall built it with Razorbill, a custom Rust-based static site generator, plus Arborist for syntax highlighting. I'm comfortable with Rust, but I wanted more flexibility for this project. So I reached for Astro instead.

I asked Marshall if I could replicate his design. He said yes.

I studied his post about the "1:1 rebuild" and the comparison tooling he wrote to achieve pixel-perfect parity. I took inspiration from that approach but went a different direction. Instead of building from source, I scraped the output and reverse-engineered the structure.

The comparison tool was key. I wrote normalizations for all the trivial differences between his HTML and mine: attribute order, whitespace, self-closing tags. Syntax highlighting was the hardest part. His Arborist library produces custom elements like <a-k> for keywords. Shiki doesn't. I created custom themes that match his color palette instead.

Building someone else's site teaches you how they think. The CSS is a design system called Xishan. I kept the design system. It's beautiful, and I'm not a designer.

This site is empty except for this post. That's intentional. I wanted the infrastructure first, the content later.

All that's left now is to write.