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From Gatsby gridlock to Astro bliss: my personal site redesign

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Re: From Gatsby gridlock to Astro bliss: my personal site redesign

#31

Post by remipch »

I don't know if it has its place here but for a minimalist static website, here is my approach:

- create a simple html template using simple.css [0]

- write markdown files

- wrap pandoc [1] in a simple bash script to manually convert markdown to html

- and that's it.

By minimalist, I mean: no script, no component, no database, no react, no SEO.

The result is a minimalist website that you write in markdown.

It's very limited compared to full-featured frameworks, but it can do the job for a simple website.

Here is mine: [2] (I'm not a web developer at all).

[0] https://github.com/kevquirk/simple.css

[1] https://pandoc.org/

[2] https://remipch.github.io/

Re: From Gatsby gridlock to Astro bliss: my personal site redesign

#32

Post by jaredcwhite »

toinewx wrote: post #14

Cannot use React UI lib with Astro such as Mantine. With Gatsby it was possible. Astro is MPA while Gatsby provided SPA-like navigation. That's why Astro is not really a replacement.

You could just slap on any library like Swup.js, Turbo, etc. and get SPA-like fast navigation out of a regular "MPA" Astro site. And that's true for any MPA, actually.

In addition, I believe Astro now has their own solution for this, though I haven't tried it personally: https://docs.astro.build/en/guides/view-transitions/

Re: From Gatsby gridlock to Astro bliss: my personal site redesign

#33

Post by todotask »

I spent the entire time building a business network platform with Astro instead of WordPress or other web frameworks because it is exactly what I need to easily manage UI components and provide a safer JSX-like environment.

In comparison to Ruby on Rails, Django, and Laravel, Astro stands on the same level but much less learning curve.

Re: From Gatsby gridlock to Astro bliss: my personal site redesign

#34

Post by syndicatedjelly »

remipch wrote: post #31

I don't know if it has its place here but for a minimalist static website, here is my approach: - create a simple html template using simple.css [0] - write markdown files - wrap pandoc [1] in a simple bash script to manually convert markdown to html - and that's it. By minimalist, I mean: no script, no component, no database, no react, no SEO. The result is a minimalist website that you write in markdown. It's very…

My personal website was originally written this way. The compile and build script was about 20 lines of shell scripting (relying on pandoc), and could have probably been reduced further. It worked very well and I stuck with it for about 2 years before moving on to Hugo. It was a good experience to hand-roll all the components of a static site, and something every web dev should be required to do early in their career.

Re: From Gatsby gridlock to Astro bliss: my personal site redesign

#35

Post by mind-blight »

mmckelvy wrote: post #17
swyx wrote: post #5

I am still not over the collapse of Gatsby (for reference i nearly joined the company in 2017, was saved only by my own character flaws). They rode the highs - being the default docs tool for React, and building a massive ecosystem of integrations you could install out of the box. But too many abstractions, divided goals between cloud and OSS, and the better stewardship/design of Nextjs brought it down. There were th…

My bet is on Remix (which will eventually just be React Router). I think it's just the right amount of abstraction over native web functionality with a nice, simple API that doesn't deviate too much from web standards. I also think the full stack approach just makes sense for developing on the web.

I'm a huge remix fan. Remix, Shadcn, postgres, and Prisma have been great for rapid development

Re: From Gatsby gridlock to Astro bliss: my personal site redesign

#36

Post by indigodaddy »

remipch wrote: post #31

I don't know if it has its place here but for a minimalist static website, here is my approach: - create a simple html template using simple.css [0] - write markdown files - wrap pandoc [1] in a simple bash script to manually convert markdown to html - and that's it. By minimalist, I mean: no script, no component, no database, no react, no SEO. The result is a minimalist website that you write in markdown. It's very…

I quite like your philosophy and approach

Re: From Gatsby gridlock to Astro bliss: my personal site redesign

#37

Post by andrewingram »

epolanski wrote: post #6
swyx wrote: post #5

I am still not over the collapse of Gatsby (for reference i nearly joined the company in 2017, was saved only by my own character flaws). They rode the highs - being the default docs tool for React, and building a massive ecosystem of integrations you could install out of the box. But too many abstractions, divided goals between cloud and OSS, and the better stewardship/design of Nextjs brought it down. There were th…

Graphql was what made me hate Gatsby to be honest. I think Typescript's websites uses it (or used to), and I wanted to fix a bug in the website and holy hell if Gatsby made me dislike the experience..

Even as a massive GraphQL fan, the GraphQL layer is what made me migrate all my projects away from Gatsby. It just doesn’t portray it at its best.

Re: From Gatsby gridlock to Astro bliss: my personal site redesign

#38

Post by com2kid »

swyx wrote: post #5

I am still not over the collapse of Gatsby (for reference i nearly joined the company in 2017, was saved only by my own character flaws). They rode the highs - being the default docs tool for React, and building a massive ecosystem of integrations you could install out of the box. But too many abstractions, divided goals between cloud and OSS, and the better stewardship/design of Nextjs brought it down. There were th…

> But the bigger lesson is bitterer. Frontend tooling isnt worth that much.

This is a modern oddity, as historically front end tooling was worth a lot.

During the 80s and 90s, multiple companies made a lot of money off of front end tooling. Even as late as 2009 or so, Silverlight tooling was bringing in money for Microsoft. But think of how popular Flash was and the empire that helped build. Prior to that. Visual Basic helped Microsoft take over the world. Go back another generation and Borland's Delphi dominated for years.

And, arguably, all of those systems were more productive than anything we have now. (A topic I've written about many times!) As an industry, we may indeed be getting exactly what we pay for.

Re: From Gatsby gridlock to Astro bliss: my personal site redesign

#39

Post by indigodaddy »

orf wrote: post #24

Astro is fantastic. I initially used NextJS with MDX, and something simple like using relative markdown links to images was utterly impossible. I remember going down a day long rabbit hole to understand why, and it boiled down to content layer, MDX and NextJS using different, incompatible module loaders, bundlers or transpilers of some kind[1][2][3]. Ridiculous. And don’t get me started on the image component. In the…

Nice summary! Any guides you’d suggest for someone new to all of this, in terms of getting a simple blog set up with Astro?

Re: From Gatsby gridlock to Astro bliss: my personal site redesign

#40

Post by orf »

indigodaddy wrote: post #39
orf wrote: post #24

Astro is fantastic. I initially used NextJS with MDX, and something simple like using relative markdown links to images was utterly impossible. I remember going down a day long rabbit hole to understand why, and it boiled down to content layer, MDX and NextJS using different, incompatible module loaders, bundlers or transpilers of some kind[1][2][3]. Ridiculous. And don’t get me started on the image component. In the…

Nice summary! Any guides you’d suggest for someone new to all of this, in terms of getting a simple blog set up with Astro?

The getting started docs[1] are really good, I’d recommend starting there for sure.

Basically you just run a few commands and you’ve got a website. Edit the Astro files to put HTML in, don’t worry about any JavaScript.

Then try adding a simple “site header” component and using that.

1. https://docs.astro.build/en/tutorial/1-setup/2/

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