Building a new site with Astro

I’m out on paternity leave until early April, and with things finally calming down a little bit with the little one I thought I’d take a little time to build a new site.

For now this is a bit of a back-to-basics approach. I’m trying out Astro, and it feels oddly nostalgic for some reason – like I’m building a site in the early 2000s. It’s a bit of a throwback, but in a good way.

I’m keeping things really simple for now. A single stylesheet, markdown for content, and a few components.

So far Astro’s Content Collections have made getting content into the site really easy. It is nice that it uses Zod right out of the box for validation as if I’m working with TypeScript it feels wrong to have untyped data like markdown frontmatter usually is.

Honestly, it’s been a bit of a struggle not using Tailwind for the first time in quite a while–but it’s been interesting getting back into the swing of writing CSS again.

Rather than where I usually get held up when building a new site (trying to backport content, update posts I never finished, try to get things perfect…) I’m just going to start with a clean slate, minimal content, ship quickly and see where things go from there.

Wish me luck!

Nate out 🫡