Creating a Website with Astro

What this blog post is

To start off, let me explain the purpose of this blog post. It is definetly not a tutorial. If you are trying to figure out how to create a website with astro, there are plenty of other resources. The Official Documentation probably being the best place to start.

It also isn’t an in-depth analysis of the pros and cons of astro. It is simply an opportunity for me to practice writing blog posts.

I find that the easiest way for me to figure out how to do something, is to just go out and do it. Sometimes I find myself in a position where a new technology I want to try out aligns itself perfectly with a nice low stakes project where I can actually use the technology in a useful maner (like this website as a whole). Oftentimes, I just try to come up with some sort of idea that makes some sort of sense, and go from there. And that is what this blog post is. Simply a tool for me to practice writing blog posts in Astro (as well as blog posts in general).

Why Astro

So let’s start off by getting into the creation of this site. Why astro? Well to answer the question most upfront: I thought it looked cool. I heard about it somewhere (A Fireship video I think) and wanted to try it out. The conecpt of being able to A) use multiple different javascript frameworks to create UI components and B) write content in markdown and have it rendered to the webpage seemed awesome. I wanted to try it out, and using it for a personal website seemed like the perfect choice.

First impressions

Honestly, it is great. It is everything that it was advertised (at least so far). The documentation is really useful for going from nothing, to your first content on a webpage. So far, I have only used it for this simple project, so I can’t speak to its ability to work at scale, or to handle more complex projects. I can say, that if you are looking for a tool to build a blog, portfolio, or personal site, Astro is great. It seems to be very content focused, not having to be bogged down by the world of frontend javascript frameworks if you don’t want to, but also having that as on option, and only where you need it. As of now, it just seems like what HTML should be for the 21st century.

Closing Remarks

Well, that is it for now. I might update this post later on after I finish construction of this site, or maybe in a year or so after I have to maintain it. Like I mentioned, this is not meant to be any sort of comprehensive post with complex or even insightful analysis. As of now, I have my first blog post on my website, and learned a bit more about Astro in the process, so it served it’s purpose.