The site should feel like a working surface: reflective, layered, slightly unstable in the best way. Not a template. Not a brochure. A field of signals.
The durable move is to keep the publishing system plain and structured underneath. Markdown, typed metadata, generated pages, and static HTML give the site a calm core. The visual system can be more expressive because the content model is boring in the right places.
Glass is useful when it implies depth. It fails when it becomes a filter pasted onto cards. The goal here is hierarchy: foreground panels, ambient motion, refracted color, and page-level hue that follows the subject.
That gives us a design that can shift from essay to lab note to book page without becoming a different website every time.