I hosted the first version of this site, idly up for almost three years, with GitHub Pages. It was three HTML pages stapled together. I was a simple cat and needed nothing better. But if all goes right, I’ll be making proper (i.e. presentable) development efforts soon, which I’d like to document as I go. I also wanted someplace to host the art I make.

So a static site generator had its merits from the outset. I thought of using Jekyll, since GitHub Pages processes sites through it already. Or Hugo. I ultimately chose Astro.js for syntax familiarity’s sake, plus Astro is framework agnostic, so it’ll be easier to reuse or expand with it.

Couple more things:

I’m a fan of the barba.js library, which uses AJAX to effectively turn a site into a single page application. Astro gets close with the ViewTransitions routing component, only the HTML it grabs is all rendered at build time. The ViewTransitions API itself lacks support for quite a few browsers, though, including the one I’m using, and the bit of client-side JS it would add isn’t ideal.

Finally—first attempt at SCSS. I like it. Unsure if it was worth breaking my “fewer dependencies” rule for—tepidity toward Rails has a bit to do with its Gems system—since/but it is just marginally faster to write for a site this size.