It's been half a year since I last rebuilt this blog so it's time to use the new shiny!

Jokes aside, I just need to properly finish this blog.

I actually wanted to rebuild the blog in Astro this same time last year. I instead chose to do a simple re-design so that I could focus my efforts on Millefeuille and Chubic. Much progress has happened with the latter so I think I'm good now.

Why Astro?

Proper Static Site Generation

The current Next.js generated site isn't really SSG. Each page is still rendered as a React app even though no JS actually runs on the page. Probably because of this reason, the site loads very slowly.

I just want it to give me plain old HTML and CSS.

Amazing Built-in Features

Astro has a built-in markdown renderer. Sweet. It means I can remove all the code around Remark.js. It's cool but too confusing. Yes, I love having to download and configure a million plug-ins to convert markdown to html. Who wouldn't?! (It's also the reason I gave up using postcss, but that's another story for another time.)

It also comes with syntax highlighting! Sweet. Something I've avoided adding because of the above reason.

Content management is built-in too. Sweet. That means I can also remove all the hacky code I wrote to parse the markdown files.

Next.js is terrible for websites

I'm not satisfied with how Next.js works as a blog. I think it's great for building a web app but it's actually really terrible for building a web site. This can be a whole article itself, actually it is a whole other article that I just haven't published yet.

Why not Hugo/Ghost/Hexo/11ty/whatever?

Because Astro excites me.

11ty was the main runner up to Astro but I preferred writing React over Pug. Also their website looks terribly outdated.

I like Hugo but their docs are terrible. I remember spending hours just to do simple stuff like formatting dates the last few times I used Hugo. And I still haven't figured out their CSS workflow after all these years. Rendering fast is cool but doesn't really matter in the end if it's so difficult to use.

I haven't looked at Ghost recently but I just didn't like it. Cool editor though.

What's the timeline?

A week to finish designing the missing parts, filling in placeholders with content and some polish. And a week (or two) to code.

I'd like to blog about building in Astro too.

What's missing?

• Lots of design elements all over
• Proper use of colours and font styles
• Responsive layouts
• Content