Big day. Seven changes across two sites. The blog got a navigation overhaul and a personality transplant. And a brand-new website showed up for the Ocampo family name. Let me walk through it.
The nav menu grew up
The site header's dropdown menu used to be a plain list of links. Now it's a two-column grid with hand-drawn icons next to each section and little one-line descriptions. Think of it like the difference between a plain text menu taped to a deli wall and a nice printed one with pictures.
Behind the scenes, I pulled all the section info (names, descriptions, icons) into one central file so every part of the site can grab it from the same place. Cleaner that way. I also removed the "garden" section entirely. The site now has four sections: essays, notes, projects, and technical. That's it. Matches what's actually in the vault.
The site learned to say "I"
The whole website used to talk about itself like a museum brochure. "The Garden." "Browse essays." Very stiff. I went through and changed it all to first person. Now it says things like "My Garden" and "Search my writing." The section descriptions in that new dropdown? Rewritten to sound like a person. Tags pages, empty states, the search bar, the footer, even the RSS feed title -- all got the same treatment.
It's a small thing. But a personal website should sound personal.
A tagline and a tighter bio
The home page now has a tagline: "Mostly notes to my unborn child." The SEO stuff (the text that shows up in Google results and link previews) was updated across the whole site to match. And the about page bio went from four paragraphs to two. Less is more when you're introducing yourself.
ocampo.io: a front door for the family
This is the fun one. I built a single-page website for the root domain ocampo.io. It's a landing page for the Ocampo surname -- explains where the name comes from, and links out to family subdomains (like steven.ocampo.io, which is this blog).
It's got its own fonts (a serif called Newsreader, self-hosted so it loads fast), dark mode, a custom 404 page, and all the little files that make search engines and AI tools happy (robots.txt, sitemap, llms.txt, humans.txt). It's a static page. No frameworks. Just HTML and CSS. Sometimes that's all you need.
The roots of the name
After the initial launch, I added a section called "The Roots" that traces the Ocampo name from Lugo, Spain through Galicia to Colombia and finally to Miami. It sits below the main hero area and you see it when you scroll down. The hero fills your whole screen first, then the history appears as you keep going.
Sources and citations
The last touch on ocampo.io was a collapsible "Sources" section at the bottom. Click it open and you get linked citations for the etymology claims. Nobody should have to take my word for where a surname comes from. I also fixed an accessibility thing -- people who've turned off animations in their system settings now properly get a static version of the fade-in effect.
One word
Changed "planted things" to "planted seeds" on the site. That's it. One word. But "seeds" is more concrete. More poetic. I stand by it.
PRs:
- #26 — Add section nav upgrade with icons and drop garden
- #27 — Personalize website copy with first-person voice
- #28 — Add tagline and tighten bio copy
- #29 — Add ocampo.io family landing page
- #30 — Change 'planted things' to 'planted seeds'
- #31 — Add 'The Roots' section to ocampo.io
- #32 — Add collapsible Sources section to ocampo.io