I was looking into Astro.js and decided to follow the tutorial, which guides you through creating your own blog. It was pretty fun and came together quickly… which inspired me to use the template as my own blog. I’ve built a few over the past few years but always fixate on trying to get it looking really nice, rather than focussing on adding actual writing content. I usually end up frustrated that it’s not coming together as quickly or as nicely as I’d like and then abandon it. By now I have a handful of them collecting dust in my github repos, mostly made with variously NextJS configs.
Rebuilding with Astro
The nice thing about using Astro is that the support for markdown is amazing. You don’t have to do any sort of hacking or combining various libraries to get markdown support, it just works out of the box. Friction in the authoring process is definitely something that would prevent me from writing, so hopefully setting things up with Astro will prompt me to actually stick with it. I really feel like I just flew through the setup compared to having to google around various resources and piecemeal the markdown support together, like I usually do when I try with NextJS.
Dynamic UI?
Astro doesn’t tie you to any specific framework, which is why I was curious about it — I was originally looking at SolidJS and wondered which frameworks I could use to build the actual site and take care of things like routing etc. I’m surprised how much I could do with Astro with just plain vanilla JS, and at the moment I don’t have any libraries to take care of reactive UI, be it React, Solid, or whatever else. I’m interested in trying something new though as I work with React during the day and have heard good things about Solid, so I might add that to this site at some point and play around with it.