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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

#41

Post by dartos »

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…

Idk if I’d call my setup minimalist, but I write blog posts in org, and use ox-Hugo to export them to hugo.

I like hugo.

Good tempting language and taxonomy features.

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

#42

Post by dartos »

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…

I think frontend tooling is valuable, but there’s so much good free out there that it’s hard to monetize.

Gatsby always seemed wildly overengineered to me. It’s like all the bad parts of react, with all the bad parts of complicated js tooling, and none of the upsides.

Never made sense.

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

#43

Post by swyx »

com2kid wrote: post #38
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 Ba…

yes good point. ofc Unity/Unreal Engine today also makes great money.

i think those frontends you mention made money because they had defacto monopoly on a certain platform or kind of experience that was unavailable anywhere else. xcode is a piece of absolute crap but i still have to pay $100 a year or whatever for it.

perhaps the emergence of web standards - both JS and browser standards - killed frontend. when everyone can build their own tools that run everywhere, and the browser api's are often pretty good, then why buy instead of build, or pick the next one that is free and good enough.

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

#44

Post by swyx »

vladgur wrote: post #25
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…

I am for one surprised that the initial concept of Gatsby -- a static site generator with React, GraphQL and other hype words of late 2010s -- was actually able to raise $40+ million dollars to build a platform for what to me at the time seemed incredibly over-engineered stack for static html pages and an unproven founder. It was truly a testament of times

we do live in a society

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

#45

Post by swyx »

mmckelvy wrote: post #30
swyx wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which will eventually just be React Router how strongly do you believe this. because ive just read both docs and i think they have different goals/audiences (tho obviously same owner). i think react router will be a poorer project if it starts to require serverside components like it is looking

They made an announcement that they are merging the projects a little while back: https://remix.run/blog/merging-remix-and-react-router . Obviously things could change, but I think RR v7 will effectively be the next iteration of Remix.

ah yeah. they didnt quite address my concerns in that post. but they know better than i.

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

#46

Post by soufianee »

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.

Remix is backed by Shopify, compared to Next.js being backed by Vercel. Does this influence any decision to take?

Today Next.js has a big advantage which is that they have already integrated most of the new React 19 rendering features and apis. I think it will take a while for Remix to catch up to that.

Other notable frameworks are community led Waku made by Daishi Kato from Pmdrs and TanStart made by Tanner from Tanstack.

Also there's Redwood.js betting on a more integrated experience.

Today I am using Nextjs because I don't think I can go back to not using RSCs, but when Remix catches up or Waku and TanStart get to v1, I sure will give them a serious try!

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

#47

Post by MikeTheGreat »

com2kid wrote: post #38
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 Ba…

> Even as late as 2009 or so, Silverlight tooling was bringing in money for Microsoft

Huh. It always kinda seemed like a "Microsoft's version of , because Microsoft always has to compete with everything, including ". In this case, is "Adobe Flash"

I'm curious if people have examples of what it was used for?

Looking at the Wikipedia page [1] which says

"According to statowl.com, Microsoft Silverlight had a penetration of 64.2% in May 2011. Usage on July 2010 was 53.6%, whereas as of May 2011 market leader Adobe Flash was installed on 95.3% of browsers, and Java was supported on 76.5% of browsers.[10]"

That shocked me - what was this used for, anyways?

Wikipedia goes on to say

"Silverlight was used to provide video streaming for the NBC coverage of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing,[11] the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver,[12] and the 2008 conventions for both major United States political parties.[13] Silverlight was also used by Amazon Video and Netflix for their instant video streaming services"

If Silverlight was being used for Netflix I can see it being installed on 60%+ of browsers just from that.

Still, I'm curious - anybody have have examples of what else it was used for?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Silverlight

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

#48

Post by bryanrasmussen »

garyrob wrote: post #12
cpursley wrote: post #3

I don’t love js/ts but Astro is so nice. Don’t have to fiddle with react or graphql. Just upgraded to 5 beta and nothing broke. Really well managed project. Oh, and page load speed is insane.

If you don't love js/ts maybe you'd like Civet, which transpiles to js/ts and has Astro integration. (No relationship, I've just been looking at it myself.) https://civet.dev

transpiling to JS that has if, if else structures instead of just early return if makes me not trust it (based on first "pattern matching" example on civet.dev site). I guess I have my prejudices.

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

#49

Post by azangru »

rpastuszak wrote: post #20

This looks lovely! I've been recently working on sth similar: building a custom pipeline from my Obsidian notes into a website (untested.sonnet.io). I ended up using 11ty because I wanted to stick as close to the web platform as possible, but a part of me wishes I had tried Astro as well. Mainly because I feel that it strikes the right balance when it comes to flexibility and boilerplate. 11ty is lovely, but there wa…

Plus one for eleventy. Love its minimalism and flexibility, although it means that there isn't a clear guidance on assets management. It's a shame that the web still doesn't have a standard way of authoring components, and different frameworks and static-site generators, including eleventy, have to invent their own.

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

#50

Post by cmgriffing »

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.

This is a bit misleading. You are only prevented from using UI libs that use a Provider/Context (like Mantine does) since Astro does not support Context.

Things like shadcn/ui work fine, even when statically rendered.

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