Rebuilding this site with Astro

The previous version of this site was an Angular 15 single-page app with Bootstrap and jQuery. It worked, but it was a lot of framework for what is, ultimately, a page about me. It has gone sufficiently stale enough that updating it felt like archaeology.

So I rebuilt it with Astro. The whole site now compiles to plain HTML and CSS with a few hundred bytes of JavaScript for the theme toggle, mobile menu, and scroll animations. No client-side framework, no hydration, nothing to keep patched.

Why static

This site deploys to plain static hosting. That constraint turns out to be a feature:

• No database. Blog posts are markdown files in the repo. Writing a post is writing a file; publishing is a git push and a build.
• No moving parts. There is no server to update, no CMS to secure, no dependency between the content and any runtime.
• Fast by default. Every page is pre-rendered at build time.

The old repo actually contained an abandoned docker-compose.yml for a WordPress + MySQL setup, the road not taken. A markdown folder does the same job with zero infrastructure.

What carried over

The content moved into typed data files, so updating the site means editing one TypeScript object instead of hunting through component templates. The design is new: dark-first with a light mode, and considerably less Bootstrap.

More posts to follow. There’s an RSS feed if that’s your thing.