A new home for Xetabit

The site you’re reading is brand new. I rebuilt xetabit.com from the ground up, and since I spend a lot of time obsessing over details most never notice, I figured I’d write down what went into it — partly to mark the occasion, partly because the choices say something about how I like to build things, and I am notoriously elusive online.

Why rebuild at all?

The old site did its job, but it had drifted out of sync with reality. Newsbin had grown a lot, especially with a new pricing model, dozens of releases — and the site still described an earlier version of the app. When the marketing and the product clash, the marketing is wrong. So rather than patch it, I started over with something I could keep honest and open for more.

Built with Astro

The whole site is static, built with Astro. No framework, no client-side bloat, nothing loading that doesn’t need to. Pages are plain HTML by the time they reach you, which means they’re fast, they work without JavaScript, and they’ll keep working for a long time with very little maintenance. For a small studio, that boring reliability is a feature. It feels pretty fresh, which is funny because it’s more akin to the early 2000’s web design than the Single Page Web App land we live in these days.

Lightest and darkest

The site has two looks — a dark “midnight” theme and a light “paper” theme — and it follows your system preference automatically, with a manual toggle if you’d rather override it. Every color is a single variable, so the two themes stay in step.

It’s a small thing, but it’s the kind of small thing I care about: the site should feel native to the Mac it’s being viewed on, the same way the apps do.

One palette, a nod to Apple

There’s a quiet system underneath the color. Each Xetabit app borrows one stripe from the classic six-color Apple logo as its accent — green for Newsbin, with yellow and orange waiting for the apps coming next. The studio itself stays a neutral graphite, deliberately outside that rainbow. It’s a love letter to the Apple I grew up with, hidden in a CSS variable.

An honest, living changelog

There’s now a full changelog going back to launch — every release, with real dates and real notes. Newsbin gets updated almost every week, and I wanted that pace to be visible rather than buried in App Store version history. It’s also, fittingly, got its own RSS feed. An RSS app’s website should have a feed. That one made me smile.

No tracking, naturally

The apps collect zero data, and the site uses only privacy-friendly, cookieless analytics — no ad networks, no cross-site tracking, nothing that identifies you. That’s the same principle the apps are built on, and it would feel strange to abandon it the moment you land on the marketing page.

A new toy worth a mention

While I was building this, I started playing with Spline — a browser-based 3D design tool — and I’m really impressed. It makes real-time 3D approachable in a way I didn’t expect, the kind of thing that used to mean wrestling with a heavyweight app (flashback to college) and a steep manual. I haven’t gone all out with it yet, but don’t be surprised if a tasteful bit of depth starts making its way into the this site and apps as I get comfortable. It’s a delightful tool, and a rare one that got me excited to experiment.

What’s next

This is a foundation, not a finish line. There’s more coming — more apps (two of them this year), more writing here, and plenty of polish I’ll keep quietly adding. If you want to follow along, the blog has a feed — subscribe in Newsbin, of course.

Thanks for stopping by the new place. Have a look around.