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Thank You

I agonize over choosing tech. That agonizing will definitely be a recurring topic on this blog.

I had originally intended to write a blog using the very good Hugo running on Cloudflare like so. I still believe those are excellent technologies, and I would have been happy to use them. I’ve used Hugo quite a bit, especially to host internal sites on GitLab Pages.

Unfortunately, well, I can never leave well enough alone. One of my very good friends, a software developer, one of my mentors, admonished me for not simply using WordPress. According to WordPress, at the time I’m writing this, it still powers 42% of the web. He argues to go with what’s easiest and fulfills your needs. He’s probably right. I would probably get much more done if I followed this advice. But yeah, I can’t, I just don’t have that in me.

So, I went casting about. I had heard an interview on JS Party about Astro, but I’d promptly forgotten about it. I’m not a JavaScript dev. I’m not a fan of the language. No shade for those who love it. I simply do not. TypeScript is a little better, but still, it’s not my jam.

I am wanting to pick up some Rust, so I considered both Yew and Dioxus. I may revisit these once I know more Rust. I’m also a big fan of WebAssembly (Wasm), but, if I’m understanding correctly, it’s not the most performant in the browser at present, so that was also a strike against these. Plus, very subjectively, I wasn’t super impressed with the visual appeal of the examples I found with either. I didn’t look very hard. Since I’m not the best at making tech visually appealing, I was hoping for a helping hand here.

So, what’s a JavaScript non-fan to do? Admit JS/TS are the ways to build for the web right now. So, I went back to that domain. I’d remembered Kelsey Hightower mentioning Next.js. So, I started looking at that. I was going to go down that path, but something reminded me of Astro. I legitimately don’t remember what it was. I thought it was this episode of JS Party, but after checking the transcript, if it was this episode, it was my tangential thought process that brought it back to mind. Regardless, I started looking at Astro.

Astro Modern Personal Website template in multiple color themes fanned out.

Turns out, Astro also had a bunch of templates for blogs. So, I was pretty much sold. To be fair, I originally had the intent of starting with the tutorial to roll my own. Then I thought I’d go with the official(?) template. Then I thought I might use some of the other templates to inspire me to move towards my own. Finally, I gave up and went with the one I thought was the best looking. Go check out the rest of Manuel Ernesto’s work and support them. Any problems on this site are doubtless my fault and not related to the fine work of the original template.

Netlify logo

As the “Official Hosting Partner” of Astro, it seemed like a good time for me to try Netlify. I’m going to go with the free tier. We’ll see how long that lasts me or how far I can take it. I suppose if I ever outgrow the free tier on Netlify, I could always try another free option… or start paying. I mean, that’s firmly in the realm of good problems to have, right?

Netlify even automatically integrated with Let’s Encrypt to hook me up with a free certificate. Now that is sweet. That’s the kind of quality of life feature that drives adoption of a platform. I haven’t played with a lot of Netlify’s direct competitors, so I’m not sure if this is a common feature, but, regardless, it’s awesome.

Thank you!

To all the tech and people behind the tech I’ve used to create this website: THANK YOU! I’m sure I’ll use other tech as the site evolves, and I’ll try to shout those out as I go, but thanks in advance to those as well.