new year, new site... part 24
Well, it’s been a year since the last time I did this.
The new tech stack:
- Astro: I just wanted to use html, and get away from react. I couldn’t picture giving up on my tools completely and it was between Astro or Eleventy. I’ve used Eleventy for a lot of projects, and even helped build the (now woefully out of date) starter experience on Glitch. So, I went for the thing I hadn’t gotten as much experience with, Astro 🚀. Astro is doing a lot of magic under the hood to handle things like images, which means less that I have to do 💪
- Open-Props: The first thing I reach for when I’m making anything now. Lets me write CSS, but fast.
- Surge: Super easy deployment. When I finish writing a post in Tina, it updates with a git commit. That fires off a github action that runs
surge deploy distand that’s all it takes. It’s what Vercel used to be 😭
Goals
Going in to the holiday week I had a few goals:
- Stop writing so much react code. I do it at work, and I recently decided to completely move away from the React ecosystem for Subeta.
- Not write as much code myself 🥵 All of the remix code I was writing as features were being solidified. It was cool, but it did not make it easy. Now there are a lot of easy methods of writing markdown file blogs with astro, that come with things like image optimization and categories.
- Give myself room to write more frequently, but less quality. Now I’ve got the home page free of anything but a single promoted post. Everything else is on the posts or categories page, with the goal of making my weekly posts not feel like front page spam.
End of year
I’m going to do a full write up of 2023, but at the end of the year I took a two week trip to New Zealand.
We rented a camper van in Christchurch.
We took a boat tour out on a glacier.
I ate a piece. I really appreciated the balance the bioligist struck in talking about the science they could now do because the glacier was melting, and the sadness of the glacier melting.
