Switching site development to Astro

Starting small

When I first created this neocities account, I had one main rule in mind: use plain, vanilla HTML and CSS. Start small, humble. After all, this is what neocities is about in its core, isn’t it? To build your own website from scratch. To satisfy that feeling of nostalgia to simpler times, back when websites were static, without all those JavaScript-powered sprinkles on top of sprinkles on top of frosting on top of- you get the point.

I wanted to start from the minimal setup, since that’s neocities promote: simple, static, self-curated websites. Where the website itself is a glimpse into your personality and creative freedom. After exploring some of the websites out there I was blown away how diverse and beautiful websites people make - and I hoped that maybe one day mine will be like that as well.

So I created a folder, opened my code/text editor, and set up a repository, and started writing HTML and CSS from scratch.

And then some.

And then some more.

And then I wanted for it to look good on mobile as additional challenge.

And then I did a small rebuild with new theme.

And then I rebuilt it again.

And then I changed theme again.

And then

And…

The bottleneck

I realized how tedious it started to become to change things on my website. And the website itself isn’t even that big! It’s just few pages. But whenever I wanted to change something common, like a header, I had to manually copy-paste changes everywhere. It was messy. And I was getting tired of it, especially since I started feeling like I want to change my website’s look drastically soon, and I won’t have it in me to copy-paste everything manually during prototyping. There must be an easier way to do it, right?

And there was. And even neocities promote it on their website.

Static site generators.

I cannot remember exactly how - maybe YouTube put it in my recommended section - but I found out about Astro - web framework focused on site performance. It can work as static site generator, or it can be used alongside frameworks like Vue or React.

-yeah yeah, React’s actually a library not a framework yadda yadda

After looking into sample projects, I’ve decided to give it a go. I’ve spent most of January and February migrating my website from plain HTML to Astro, at the same time doing a massive rework, result which you’re probably seeing right now! And the best part is, it does not affect you - the guest of this website - in the slightest. The resulting website still is just plain HTML and CSS, but the way I work on it is more comfortable: I can write blog posts as markdown files and they will be inserted into HTML. I can write reusable components that get converted into proper pages at build. That is until I finally start introducing some bits of JavaScript here and there… but so far I managed to solve all my problems with just the right CSS.

-and many hours past my bedtime…

Last thoughts

Looking back, I should probably start thinking of static sites generators earlier, but I was thinking to myself that this is such a simple website, I don’t need one. But I wasn’t sure if this project will interest me as much as it actually did.

I am in no way a social media chatty person, but maybe this little project will give me space to share my thoughts on my hobbies and interests.

I hope I will keep refining my website, and most and foremost - keep having fun while doing so!

Until next time!