Personal Website

Made with Astro, TypeScript & CSS

I recently redeveloped my website using the Astro static site generation framework. My previous website had been a Vue.js single-page application, which was not a great fit for a static site since the interaction responsiveness benefits typically associated with SPAs were not necessary here. The main reasons I had chosen to use Vue previously were that I wanted to get more experience with it, and I had not found a static site generator that I liked using. When I initially became aware of Astro over a year ago, I had been interested in using it for my personal website, but I only got around to rebuilding my site after I finished my last year of college.

My website is relatively simple, consisting of a single layout, a homepage, a few content collections with associated dynamic routes, and content for those collections written using Markdown. I have not used some of the more complex features of Astro, but the responsiveness of its dev server and its balance of ease of use versus control have made it very enjoyable to use. It has also removed a few SPA-related issues with my website, like the soft 404 problem, that would otherwise require server-side rendering, and has made it dramatically easier to author new content compared to my old JSON-based methods. I’d definitely be interested in looking into Astro further, but for now it has been a great tool for making me actually want to update my website again.