Readit Newsjwngr commented on From Gatsby gridlock to Astro bliss: my personal site redesign jwn.gr/posts/migrating-fr... · Posted by u/jwngr
Fully concur with the points you made. I also just finished transitioning my personal website to Astro from an Eleventy setup that I got too lazy to maintain. I made a couple of landing pages for clients and my own projects with Astro and the maintenance experience was eye-opening.
Astro really is quite wondrous. If you don't stray too far from its opinionated route, it's almost magical. But some more advanced things do still take some tinkering. My sitemap and RSS with full text setups I wouldn't describe as the most elegant things in existence, but they do their job.
What I'm still lacking/wondering about is whether there's a CDN static site/serverless hosting provider like Netlify, Vercel or Cloudflare, but that isn't free or $20/mo. I'd like to pay for a good service that obviously has running costs, but I don't believe there's quite something like those.
Anyway, I like the website. It's easy on the eyes.
Thanks for sharing! I use Fireabse Hosting, which I guess gets grouped in with the other services you mentioned. It's free, has a lightweight devX, and integrates with CI via GitHub actions for preview and production builds [1].
[1] https://github.com/jwngr/jwn.gr/tree/master/.github/workflow...
jwngr commented on From Gatsby gridlock to Astro bliss: my personal site redesign jwn.gr/posts/migrating-fr... · Posted by u/jwngr
keystatic supports editing mdx files. keystatic is basically a frontend to update files on github, so if e.g. you want to write a blog post from your phone it can let you do that kind of thing.
Oh cool, I see. Didn't get that impression when I first looked. I will check it out!
jwngr commented on From Gatsby gridlock to Astro bliss: my personal site redesign jwn.gr/posts/migrating-fr... · Posted by u/jwngr
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.
Not a full replacement in all scenarios. But for my personal website with a basic blog, Astro is by far the simpler and more maintainable option. I bet that is true for most people here who maintain their own personal website.
jwngr commented on From Gatsby gridlock to Astro bliss: my personal site redesign jwn.gr/posts/migrating-fr... · Posted by u/jwngr
if you keep your site on github, i found keystatic to be a really nice authoring experience:
https://github.com/Thinkmill/keystatic
Thanks for the link. I prefer the simplicity of .mdx files for now. My use case is very basic and Astro already handles it well.
jwngr commented on From Gatsby gridlock to Astro bliss: my personal site redesign jwn.gr/posts/migrating-fr... · Posted by u/jwngr
I have heard great things about astro, but my experience with Gatsby keeps me away. I would much rather keep an SSR framework like Remix and handle whatever pipeline is needed myself. No magic.
I felt the same way! But I came around. Take a look at the source code for a component [1]. The .astro format is pretty much just TS, CSS, and HTML. I don't even need React anymore. Way less glue code and dependencies than with Gatsby. There is a configuration file and some abstractions for things like collections, but almost everything is opt-in.
[1] https://github.com/jwngr/jwn.gr/blob/master/src/components/b...
jwngr commented on From Gatsby gridlock to Astro bliss: my personal site redesign jwn.gr/posts/migrating-fr... · Posted by u/jwngr
Great write up, will be curious to see if Astro sticks around. It seems like all the static site gens last a few years then fade away - Jekyll, Hugo, Gatsby, etc.
Me too! The closer my framework is to raw HTML, JavaScript (really TypeScript nowadays), and CSS, the less lock-in I feel. Those 3 languages are continue to get better year over year. And we are get better framework abstractions every few years too. Astro feels like it hit the sweet spot, but maybe there is more to come.
jwngr commented on From Gatsby gridlock to Astro bliss: my personal site redesign jwn.gr/posts/migrating-fr... · Posted by u/jwngr
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 the simple lessons (https://swyx.io/a-world-without-plugins-cig). its easy to say in hindsight that graphql was too much for gatsby. i also believe the company went too hard for number of integrations over quality of them, an issue I had even in my interview. this was a poorer expression of the better insight that seb markbage had; just have a small api surface area bro (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4anAwXYqLG8)
But the bigger lesson is bitterer. Frontend tooling isnt worth that much. the fact that vercel is pretty much the only successful frontend startup of its generation makes it an exception to the rule (there are plenty of smaller companies that are thriving, like tailwind, but it is not a venture scale startup and thats fine). People dont pay for frontend tooling. they expect it to be free, expect it to do everything, get into internicine squabbles between frameworks when they are all basically doomed compared to just betting on React sponsored by Facebook and now Vercel (and a little bit of Shopify), or going back to fullstack frameworks like Django/Rails/Laravel. all frontend tooling, nextjs included, is just leadgen, loss leaders, while investors/salespeople patiently wait until you "grow up" by... building cloud backend/ci/cd services.
5 years ago i wrote about the "frontend ceiling" for individual developer careers (https://x.com/swyx/status/1682748872047886337) - i fear this is the "frontend ceiling" for companies.
I deeply admire Astro and hope they figure out a way to break the ceiling. Their recent cloud products have been encouraging.
Astro is what I wanted and thought Gatsby would be. GraphQL was the wrong sized abstraction for a basic blog site like mine. And once Gatsby turned towards the cloud (which made sense as a business), everything just got so complicated. I was swept up by it too.
Cool insight on frontend ceilings -- deployment is king.
jwngr commented on From Gatsby gridlock to Astro bliss: my personal site redesign jwn.gr/posts/migrating-fr... · Posted by u/jwngr
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.
Yeah they really nailed the developer experience. There is very little magic to it.
Thanks for reminding me! I'll give Firebase a look.
By the way, very minor thing I noticed. Clicking on your photo on the homepage swaps backgrounds, but the timer-based swapping still runs on its fixed interval. Can look unpolished if you click it a bunch or in the wrong moment.