# The Max Frequency 2026 Redesign A new coat of paint is incoming to Max Frequency. Actually, it's a whole new chassis, and this time I figured it would be better to show it off first and *then* make the change. Behold, Max Frequency 5.0. ![[260227_Redesign_New_Home.png]] The blog roll is back baby! And a little side-by-side for you. ![[260227_Redesign_Pub_Home.png]] ![[260227_Redesign_New_Home.png]] Let me give you the tour this time before diving into the *how* this design came about. ### Breaking Down the Redesign Right away, the landing page style Home is gone. I never loved it. I "had" to use one given the nature of Obsidian Publish, my previous host. Since everything was launched out of markdown files in Obsidian, I needed a home page to anchor the digital garden approach that is core to the app. I suppose I could have done some huge long embedded note of all my other notes, but that'd be unwieldy and ugly. To me, the core of a blog's presentation is the feed. [^1] It has been irksome to me to not have one. I tried workarounds like a dataview query that renders the 15 most recent posts and embedding that into the homepage. It's not the same. I think natural discoverability has been kneecapped for the last two years. Beneath that "Latest & Greatest" list was another list idea that I implemented last summer dubbed "Previously On Max Frequency." The premise is simple—show a list of articles published on the day you're visiting the site from the past. In Obsidian Publish, that requires updating said list every day for the info to be accurate. Of course, the new blog's list updates automatically. With the return of the blog feed, I couldn't put that list at the bottom, so I opted to put it on the right-hand side. I think it balances out the menu on the left. Actually, I tried to balance all four corners. The menu and the memories up top. The "Now Playing" music status and the fun little emoji and links on the bottom. Let's zero in on the articles themselves. ![[260302_Redesign_New_Article Heading.png]] We got a headline, the date, and another long-desired feature—[a lil permalink icon](https://lucide.dev/icons/square-activity). A feature I’ve admired for years on other blogs is this ability to send folks to the source when they click the headline and they can go to your permalinked version of the article by clicking a little icon. ![[260302_Redesign_All Perm.png]] This functionality feels so core to the big "I" Internet and blogging. I don't know for sure, but it must be a pillar behind the ideas like "retweets" and share posting. I want to point people to the source, not just my thoughts on said source. A recent example is [[Mario Tennis Fever Is the Best Mario Sports Game Ever Made – Jake Steinberg|this review]] about *Mario Tennis Fever*. I want my audience to go read Jake Steinberg's piece and I hope my gawking at it will point them to it. I also know people online want as little friction as possible. It couldn't be any easier than just clicking the heading in the blog roll. If you want my link, I wager your can figure it out. I'm trusting my audience with that one. That's the core reading experience—low friction, up front, simple. How about older stuff? What about the things buried by the feed? That's where the [[Archive]] comes in. ![[260302_Redesign_Pub_Archive.png]] ![[260302_Redesign_New_Archive.png]] Yeah. This is much, much better. No more folder hierarchy and spelunking my organizational structure. I wanted to give you a list of years, articles, and a search. Speaking of the search, it just takes you to Google. Lean and snappy without a need for some sort of searchable database on my backend. Why not just let the company that does this for a living handle it? The URL structure here is straightforward too. The whole deal is at `/archive`. You can zero in on a specific year by clicking the links at the top or just by adding it to the url, `/archive/2020`. Want the month? Add that too, `archive/2020/06`. Moving on down to the Podcasts page, we see the same solution to the archive applied to [[The Max Frequency Podcast]]. I had to just render the ten most recent episodes. Now, you get a simple list of them all. These pages act like a hub of sorts. This hub mentality is crucial for my Game Library and Game Notes. ![[260305_Redesign_New MFP.png]] Before, Game Notes just existed inside a folder; no structure beyond being alphabetized. My thought was always that the Game Library would be a hub page of sorts for the game and you could find my notes there. The Game Library itself has been a slow process to be sure, but this new blog gives readers a much easier to navigate collection. It's so much more visually appealing too. The art I was already using renders nicely on these tiny cards. ![[260305_Redesign_New_Library Hub.png]] ![[260305_Redesign_New_Library N64.png]] The pages for [[Memory Card]], [[Chasing the Stick – The History of Naughty Dog|Chasing the Stick]], [[About]]. [[Gear]], and [[Now]] are all the same. Those are fairly static pages or I had already designed them the way I wanted within Obsidian and I don't feel they need a refresh. A new page in the menu though is [[Feeds]]. A few months ago, I made a sort of master RSS feed by combining all my Max Frequency related feeds into one with [[RSSRSSRSSRSS-ing Max Frequency|RSSRSSRSSRSS]]. This page offers up all of those feeds individually for those into RSS. Now, another grievance I have had with Obsidian Publish (and a big spur to giddy up this redesign) was the RSS feed support for Publish is abysmal. It fetches only the title, no body content. If I move a file to a different folder, then Publish would flood the feed with "new" old articles.[^2] When I was [[I Got "Fireballed"|fireballed]] last year, I got quite a few requests for the RSS feed—so much so that I added it to the Home page—even though I was embarrassed by Publish's performance. I no longer need to be embarrassed because this transition has given me a full and proper RSS feed that works exactly like an RSS feed should. It looks great inside [[Current - An RSS River by Terry Godier|Current]] and NetNewsWire, but the looks are all the developers. I am so pleased to have this functionality back and not shamefully share my RSS feed. One element of the new blog experience I haven't touched on yet is mobile. I am biased, but it looks great there too. ![[260305_Redesign_iPhone.jpg]] The blog feed takes center stage, of course. Appearance controls and the menu are in the upper right. Opening the menu reveals, yes the menu, but also the Now Playing music indicator. I kept the nav anchored to the right, since your finger just pressed the menu button to open it. No sense in making you then stretch across to the other side of the screen. If you click into an article and reach the bottom, that is where you will find the "Previously On" list, emoji, etc. I think the reading and navigation experience really lend themselves to mobile. I considered iPad as well, at least my pink iPad we just bought a few months ago. Browsing on iPad is a fusion of desktop and mobile, so I was sure to make sure both worked automatically on iPad depending on the device orientation. ![[260305_Redesign_iPad-bg.png]] And that's it. I think? One big unseen element is fixing 170~ broken links and recreating all my podcast transcripts into markdown from PDF; much faster and lighter. There's plenty of smaller things too, like those popup footnotes and integrating [lite-youtube-embed](https://github.com/paulirish/lite-youtube-embed). There may be a "hidden" page or two. Overall though, the presentation of Max Frequency is in alignment with my tastes. I hope it is in alignment with yours too. But how did I make it? ### The How Claude Code. That's the how. Been working on a site idea at work and using Claude Code for that. It feels like everyone is out here making apps and projects with these agentic AI coders. I wondered, "Can Claude Code build me my dream blog? The blog I've been envisioning for the last 13 years?" Obviously, the answer is yes. That question hit me one afternoon and I decided to try it out in the most vibe code-y way possible—[[260218_Redeign_Cooking and Coding.jpg|while cooking dinner]]. I finally used my MacBook Pro as a *laptop* and took it inside to run Claude Code while I cooked dinner for my family. Since it was a pure test and I gave it a small sample size, I was basically pressing ⌘ + ⏎ every few minutes. No risk at all. The first result was [[260218_Redeign_v1.jpg|recognizable]], but broken. More importantly though, this convinced me it was doable. The next day or two was a hyperfocused blur of tuning and getting the site dialed in. Fervent back and forth with Claude. After getting the shape of it, I decided to spend the following days, weeks co-publishing to the platform and Obsidian Publish. You notice missing elements and breaks this way. For example, the RSS feed was only sharing blog posts, not podcasts, newsletters, etc., or how callouts were jank and the Game Library entries weren't formatting correctly. The living with the blog is vital. I went to grab a link for friend and went to my Publish blog since that was the most accessible—it felt outdated and clunky. That's when I knew I chose the right direction. Before wrapping up, I wanted to highlight some gains and losses here. | Gains | Losses | | ----------------------- | ---------------------- | | A Proper RSS Feed | None? | | Blog Roll Returns | A New Form of Lock In? | | Custom layout and icons | | | Free! | | All right, the table is jokey, but true. The *way* I write Max Frequency has not changed. I could flip Obsidian Publish back on in 5 minutes and the site would be back in business. I could move to a different static site generator. Right now, everything is running through GitHub and CloudFlare Pages all for $0 from my $96 per year from Obsidian, which by the way, is due here in April... While I am not locked into a platform or a service provider. I am locked into Claude for changes, improvements, and troubleshooting. That is a form of lock in. As ubiquitous as AI is becoming, I don't think it's too rigid a form of lock in. At this moment, the capabilities it has given me far outweigh the lock in cage. With everything I write still be markdown, I am not worried about needing to pivot somewhere else some day should I need to abandon this custom site. ### Conclusion In all of this, I went back and read my old posts on previous redesigns of the site. Two quotes from [[The Max Frequency 2024 Redesign]] stand out to me; > "That Spring I reached out in the Relay FM Discord to see if I could hire someone. I knew what I wanted – some sort of hosting from a service like Linode or something. My issue was my web programming knowledge capped off at the basics of HTML and CSS. I knew the destination, I just didn't know how to get there." > Moving everything to Markdown and Publish has given me something I've never had in all my years of writing online. > > Flexibility. Freedom. > > I have the flexibility to make my site look the way I (currently) want, without the need of a $300 tier to access Wordpress plugins. I have the flexibility to write and publish how I want. I have the flexibility to use the tools I want—and ignore the tools I don't. > > I have the freedom to leave Publish at any time without losing my articles, links, or data. I have the freedom to not worry about mega-corporate owners selling my work from under me. I have the freedom to write and publish what I want, when I want. I probably could never have afforded a developer. I remember being pointed to solutions, but not to someone who could take my plain speech and turn it into a website. Claude is that for me now. The move to markdown and Publish did give me freedom and flexibility. I did have the freedom to leave when I wanted. I'm doing it now. Over the next day or two, this whole switch is going to take place. Who am I kidding, it'll happen tomorrow. The RSS feed is the same - https://maxfrequency.net/rss.xml - so that should update seamlessly for all you current subscribers. I don't know what will break or hang up. It might be a bumpier launch than I expect: That's why I wanted to tell you all first. Thank you for your patience. [Please be excited](https://images.pushsquare.com/1b4c97c877a29/1280x720.jpg) for the new design. I hope you enjoy. [^1]: The core of a blog is, of course, its author. [^2]: Like I do at the start of every year when moving the previous year into the archive. I even got an email from a kind and concerned reader to make sure everything was working okay when I made the switch this year.