bogdan floris
software engineer · bucharest · writes about systems & software

A Personal Website in Rust and Tailwind

2026-04-21 · rust · web · design

I mainly used React at work, which I'm not a particularly big fan of for a multitude of reasons I won't get into here. So when I went to build my personal website, React was out of the question. I thought about Svelte because my past coworkers swore by it, but Svelte is still JavaScript frontend framework number #92321223.

Instead I went with what I already knew — templating on the server — with one twist: I'm learning Rust to get more comfortable with systems engineering, so it seemed like a natural pick for the backend. As for why Axum? ¯_(ツ)_/¯. Reddit recommends it and it seemed simple enough. It really is.

The look

I took a hard look at sites I actually enjoy reading — jvns.ca being the obvious one — and what they have in common is that they look like paper. Narrow reading column, serif body, mono metadata, and not a lot else going on.

So that's what this is. A ~680px column, Source Serif 4 for the body, JetBrains Mono for dates and tags. No shadows, no rounded cards, no hero section. Gruvbox light, one theme. I am basically obsessed with Gruvbox, I run it on everything, so it seemed natural to use it here too.

The stack

[dependencies]
axum = "0.7"
askama = "0.12"
tokio = { version = "1", features = ["full"] }
tower-http = { version = "0.5", features = ["fs"] }
pulldown-cmark = "0.13"
syntect = "5"
serde_yaml = "0.9"
chrono = { version = "0.4", features = ["serde"] }

Axum for routing, Askama for compile-time checked templates, Tailwind v4 for styling. The whole site is a single Rust binary plus a static dist/ folder for CSS and images.

let app = Router::new()
    .nest_service("/dist", ServeDir::new("./dist"))
    .route("/", get(home))
    .route("/blog", get(blog_index))
    .route("/post/:slug", get(post))
    .route("/rss.xml", get(rss))
    .with_state(state)
    .fallback(not_found);

Markdown posts

I write posts as markdown with a small YAML frontmatter:

---
title: "A Personal Website in Rust and Tailwind"
date: 2026-04-21
tags: [rust, web, design]
---

I mainly use React at work...

At startup, the server walks blog_posts/, parses frontmatter, runs the body through pulldown-cmark for HTML and syntect for syntax highlighting, and stores the result in an AppState. Routes look posts up by slug.

Drafts are skipped by default. Passing --drafts on the CLI flips a flag that includes draft: true posts — so I can run a local instance with works-in-progress visible without ever shipping them.

Tailwind v4

The theme lives in CSS, not JavaScript:

@import "tailwindcss";
@source "../templates/**/*.html";

@theme {
  --color-bg-primary: #fbf1c7;
  --color-fg: #282828;
  --font-serif: "Source Serif 4", Charter, Georgia, serif;
  --font-mono: "JetBrains Mono", ui-monospace, monospace;
}

The whole Gruvbox palette lives in one block, and class names like bg-bg-primary and font-serif come out of those variables automatically. One fewer config file to read.

RSS

There is an RSS feed at /rss.xml. Hand-rolled XML in about 60 lines of Rust, which came out shorter than pulling in another dependency. If you still read RSS, you know what to do.

Closing thoughts

Nice weekend project with Claude.

Source is on GitHub. Steal what you like.

← all posts