From Dashboard to Dispatch: Redesigning tedward.net

The Evolution of a Digital Space

If you have been here before, the place looks different. The whole site has been rebuilt from the ground up, with new architecture underneath and a completely new face on top. There is a small joke buried in the timing of this post, as it is not going out on a Friday. Every dispatch I have written for the better part of a year has landed on a Friday, like clockwork. But part of this rebuild was teaching the site to handle posts that do not wait for the weekly slot, so it felt right to let the redesign announcement be the first one to break cadence. Consider it a live demo.

The Site That Got Me Here

For a long time, tedward.net was just a CV. It was a single page that said who I was and what I could do. Then, about a year ago, I decided I wanted to actually write about the things I was building, the experiences behind them, and where my career was headed. I needed somewhere to put that, so I quickly threw together a dashboard-style portfolio with a blog bolted on.

It was only ever meant to be temporary, a placeholder to get me writing while I figured out what the real thing should be. It lasted a year. That is the way these things go: temporary is the most permanent state a website can reach. The longer it stuck around, the more the seams showed. A rotating banner, panels competing for attention, and skills as a static list. It told you I was a Full-Stack Developer, which is true, but it failed to capture the one thing that had become my reality: that I now write every single week about building at the sharp end of AI.

It had deeper problems too, ones you could not see. Because it was a client-rendered SPA, link previews did not work. Paste a post into Slack or iMessage and you got a bare URL, no title, no image. Search engines saw an empty shell. For a site whose whole purpose is writing that people share, that was quietly costing me every time.

Two Jobs at Once

The trigger was a technical migration, moving off the old Vite/SPA stack onto Next.js so pages render on the server. Once I was in there rewriting everything anyway, the temptation was obvious: redesign while the engine is out of the car. The old site answered what can this person do? The new one answers what is this person paying attention to right now? The north star for the redesign became a single shift: stop presenting as a portfolio dashboard, start presenting as what it really is, a weekly dispatch.

Technical Shift: Next.js Implementation

To ensure better SEO and social discovery, the migration to Next.js was paramount. Here is a snippet of how the new layout architecture handles dynamic metadata:

export async function generateMetadata({ params }) {
  const post = await getPost(params.slug);
  return {
    title: post.title,
    description: post.summary,
    openGraph: {
      images: [post.coverImage],
    },
  };
}

A New Editorial Experience

The home page carousel and competing panels are gone. In their place is a masthead that states the premise plainly, dispatches from the sharp end of AI and software, the running weekly streak, and the feed itself as the main event. The archive is now a first-class room of its own, featuring full-text search, a tag filter that does not overwhelm you, and related-post suggestions at the end of every piece. The reader is designed for actual reading, with proper typography, syntax-highlighted code, and a dispatch number on every post.

The About page, which previously featured a static vertical list, has been transformed into a living, auto-scrolling rail. The work page and project details, such as my AI Powered Event Management CMS, have been restyled to sit inside the new editorial language instead of fighting it.

The Genuinely New Part: Ask the Archive

One thing on the new site never existed before: Ask the Archive. It is an AI concierge that answers questions about me, my writing, and my work, grounded only in what is actually on the site. It is the piece I am most curious to see people use. Ask it what I have written about local-only AI or when I would walk away from a project.

Under the hood, the rebuild is Next.js running on AWS. The interesting story is not the framework, but how it got built: a fleet of governed AI agents, orchestrated rather than prompted one file at a time. That deserves its own post, and it is getting one. For now, roughly 30,000 lines changed, a redesign, and a handful of new features, in a couple of focused days. Same obsessions, better home. It will be here, on time, next Friday.