Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

From Gatsby gridlock to Astro bliss: my personal site redesign

jwn.gr

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 91 posts

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

#81

Post by walteweiss »

dartos wrote: post #41
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.

[dead]

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

#82

Post by joshvince »

SrslyJosh wrote: post #58

> Astro is designed as a Multi-Page Application (MPA) by default, shipping minimal JavaScript and delivering static HTML via full page reloads. So...a website. weary emoji

This is my feeling too. I’m never sure why React is the tool that is reached for in this situations (an entirely unreactive page?)

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

#83

Post by sakesun »

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…

I'd blame web browser model for productivity problem we are having now.

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

#84

Post by swyx »

andrewingram wrote: post #37
epolanski wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

(just saying hey andrew! love to see you are still on the graphql train)

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

#85

Post by Lutger »

com2kid wrote: post #54
MikeTheGreat wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Silverlight's real usage was rapid internal corporate app development. Internal tools basically. It is hard to describe exactly how absurdly popular Silverlight was at the time within corporations. Microsoft had a big internal political battle and did the stupidest thing possible and abandoned Silveright, which pissed off a LOT of companies, who then started building internal web apps instead. This lead to a slow mig…

Good analysis. They really killed the golden goose, never understood it. But internal rivalry makes sense, the same thing that bankrupted Nokia.

I know a lot of developers that were really happy in that older Microsoft ecosystem, it was a semi permeable walled garden where you could walk 'the Microsoft way' and everything was kind of laid out before you, neat and cosy. At the dev conferences when javascript started to become unavoidable, there was still a period where they kind of pretended Microsoft invented the web and gave it a nice but small spot alongside all the other, more important technology with which Real Developers make Real Software.

You could have discussions on architecture, but nothing fundamental really, and you'd always follow the prescribed pathways that Microsoft thought out for you. These changed every couple of years, which gave everybody new goals, new certifications to reach, new rewrites to accomplish and get paid for. Anyone that was moderately skilled was quite productive, and it was very easy to get into.

When the web got more complicated than html + jquery in server side generated templates, these developers often had a very bad time and fully retreated into their 'backend' role. The most recent anti javascript stronghold is Blazor, not sure if that is still a viable way to avoid modern frontend tooling.

I never really understood why Microsoft abandoned desktop gui apps like they did and left their walled garden unattended. It was one of their strong points, even though I disliked it a lot.

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

#86

Post by johnchristopher »

~4 years ago, redesign phase of our 50K a month public facing wordpress NGO website, agency strongly suggests moving to gatsby. We/I thought about it for 5 minutes and said no. I am still happy with that decision and I will push to take the same if/when another agency comes at us with Astro. Node CMS are autophagous.

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

#87

Post by rpastuszak »

azangru wrote: post #49
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.

OK, so 11ty webc is pretty good and feels relatively low on abstraction. The only issue I've had with it was the developer UX (e.g. some components getting "stuck" during livereload, so I needed to manually restart 11ty to see the changes). Webc also supports bundles.

What 11ty lacks (assuming I don't add vite, keep things minimal), are components/composition, i.e. actually being able to compose templates without seeing them as templates but as DOM.

I recommend checking out some videos about .webc and progressive enhancement, there's a small paradigm shift from both React-like components map to a tree that maps to pixels and a more traditional old timey PHP-like string interpolation in templates. (I'm expressing this poorly as I'm in a rush, sorry!)

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

#89

Post by swyx »

madeofpalk wrote: post #56
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…

Is Vercel a frontend tooling startup? I've always seen them as a AWS-wrapping hosting company, who funds some react projects on the side and will drop them at a moment's notice. Netlify, who bought Gatsby on its decline, still seems to be going alright without being a frontend tooling company.

> etlify, who bought Gatsby on its decline, still seems to be going alright without being a frontend tooling company.

what makes you so sure :/

Post reply on HN