Dev Diary #2: Swapping engines

Wow, it has been a long time since the last dev diary, more than a few years actually.

Anyways, I’m now using Astro as the static generator. But I should’ve just remade the site from scratch.

The Good

Astro is very fast, very configurable, also very cool. I’ve faced zero issues with the actual build process itself.

It also inherits a lot of the Markdown templating features that other static site generators use, which makes migrating my old, everything-hardcoded site easier.

The scoped styling is a bit of a hit-or-miss, but I sometimes prefer it over a global CSS file. I am totally not using scoped styling because the imported CSS files were not applying, noooooo, that’s stupid.

The public route was a lifesaver for a lot of my older stuff that shouldn’t get processed.

The Bad

Now, really, the issue here lies in my inability to use Astro itself (it is my first time using it after all), but setting up blogs was a pain. It took me a solid 5 hours to debug and wrangle myself out of the mess that is my blog structure.

I feel kind of sorry for Astro, seeing that it needed to handle Jekyll templates directly translated to JSX, no matter how badly it was ported.

The ugly

It was a nightmare setting up the blog generation, attributed to my incompetence and the awful structure of my site. But I guess, again, that’s on me.

The conclusion?

It’s been a while since I wrote any blog here, so forgive me if I sound like a caveman. Astro good, use it if you like it.

If you don’t, there’s always Nextjs