Rebuilding my site with Astro

What do you do when you’re bored and you don’t have any original ideas for a new project? Rebuild your website!

New framework

Okay, there were a few other real reasons why I wanted to rebuild this site. The main one was that I wanted to move from Next.js to something else and I also wanted to use markdown files for my blog, instead of Sanity as my headless CMS. Even though my experience with Next.js and Sanity was really positive, it felt like an overkill setup for what this site needed.

Last year I struggled a lot to find the time to write and every time I finally managed to sit down to write a blog post I would get distracted with customizing my Sanity studio and updating to the newest version, which is entirely my fault lol and nothing to do with the tool. But that’s why I thought simple markdown files would be a better option with less distractions.

I had heard really great things about Astro as a static site generator and after watching this video by James Q Quick I decided to give it a try and it really was the best decision. It didn’t take much to have everything I needed working, especially because the docs are very easy to follow.

One of my favorite things about Astro is that it supports multiple frontend frameworks, it allows me to use React as needed and if I want to I can add interactive components with any other framework I want to try.

Some of the other features I really liked were Astro’s markdown and syntax highlighting built in support, the filesystem routing convention, and their content collections to organize my blog content.

New design

One of the other reasons I wanted to rebuild my site was to try out a different design. For all the other iterations of this site I feel like I was doing slightly different versions of the same layout and I was kind of over it, so I decided to try something completely different this time.

After spending an afternoon deleting old files on Finder I thought it would be fun to try the same “filesystem style” for the design and I really like how it ended up looking!

This site has been my playground to try new things ever since I first started to learn how to code, it started out as plain HTML when that’s all I could handle and it’s been a really cool experience to see myself grow as a developer on each different iteration.