Published on
4/1/2023

Now Written with Astro

Hey y’all! Long time no talk. A lot has happened over the last two years since my last post, such as:

It’s hard to condense two years of your life into four bullet points, so I’m pretty sure I missed a lot of important things. Anyways, my website is now written with Astro! For the longest time this site was written in plain React.js with Create React App, and once Next.js’s server side rendering popped up I thought I’d jump on that bandwagon. It was easy to learn, and seemed to make a noticible difference in my site. Also with MDX and Markdown I was able to make my first blog, even if it was a HUGE pain to create.

However, I have come to the point where I do not need React to make my website. React is a great tool that makes frontend web development easier, but it also adds a lot of overhead to pages that do not need Javascript involved with it. A TL;DR is that server side rendering requires computation and money coming from somewhere to get the benefits of SSR. With many pages not needing Javascript and just plain HTML and CSS, I debated just going that route. However, I knew some day I might want to use React on my site or even dive into Vue/Svelte. How can I do both on the same site?

In comes Astro.

Astro was something I saw on a random YouTube channel and didn’t give it any mind for the most part until v2.0 came out. Not only does it serve only the HTML and CSS to the browser, making web page loads fast and lightweight, but it has the functionality to use other frameworks in harmony! I have not had the need to do so, but having an easy segway into it was enough for me to jump on a new bandwagon.

A downside of Astro is that it is not a Single Page Application (SPA), so when nagivating between pages there is a screen flicker. I believe Astro has a way to mimic a SPA and at this time I don’t need it. I’ve been pushing off a lot of things because I don’t think they’re perfect. That’s not the way I want to go. Right now this website just breaks on mobile and makes the background turn red. Not great for the Google SEO, but for now that’s fine. I’ll slowly work my way up.

That’s all I go for now folks. See you in another two years (maybe).