Sam Feldstein's Notebook

Personal Site - Project Notes

Updated on

I've rebuilt my personal website at least four times, but the current version might be the one that's here to stay (from an architectural standpoint).

I built the site with Astro. The code is hosted on GitHub and published with Cloudflare Pages.

Astro

Part of the reason I think this is the version of this site that's here to stay is because I think Astro is the static site generator that's here to stay. I think this for two reasons:

  1. Astro framework-agnostic. If you know HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you can use Astro.
  2. Astro forgoes a templating language in favor of web components.

The docs are solid, and the blog tutorial is as thorough as any I've seen. The community seems healthy, and whoever runs the thing clearly cares about doing things right and streamlining the process for users.

The hardest thing about Astro is keeping track of the data cascade. I try not to pass data between more than two components, because I just get all turned around.

Astro is also slightly rigid, especially when it comes to content collections. Let's say you want all your blog posts to share a common layout. To apply data to an entire folder, you have to turn that folder into a content collection. To do that, you have to put that folder inside a special content folder. And the content lives outside your pages folder. As far as I know, none of this is optional.

Maybe this isn't such a big deal most of the time, but I think it's bad practice in general to force users to put things in certain places. I'd prefer to arrange my content how I want. As a practical example, if I wanted to set up Astro so that it works with Foam, something I intend to try someday, the fact that content collections live separately from the rest of the site is going to make things difficult.

Web Components

This was my first time working with web components. I'm not running much JavaScript on the site, so I don't necessarily use all the powers they possess, but they still streamline the building process immensely.

For example, component let you scope scripts and styles to the component, rather than relying on a global css file. So a site built with components only loads the code that's actually used on the page. Astro enables this behavior by default.

This also makes it easier to manage styles. When I want to change my sidebar's appearance, I don't have to hunt around for .sidebar in my styles.css file. Instead, I just open the sidebar component, and the styles are there along with the html and JavaScript.

Design

I agonized over the design for this site for quite some time. It is my personal site, after all, and I want to make a good first impression. But I'm uncomfortable with graphic design, so after a ton of iterations I decided to go with something simple but elegant. Molly White's website and Gwern Branwen's website were nice guideposts here.

Performance

I like to build fast websites because it makes me feel like I know what I'm doing. Styles and scripts are inlined by default, and thanks for component scoping, overall page size is kept to a minimum.

Astro lets you enable global prefetching, so I did. I don't know if the script it injects offsets the benefits, but I assume/hope they thought of that.

The biggest performance boost came after I increased Cloudflare's cache lifespan. Assets are now saved to the browser, which means no more network requests for font files.

One thing I'd like to do is get a service worker up and running. If I can figure out how to serve everything from the cache first, and update the site in the background, that would be ideal. This would also let you browse the site without an internet connection.

Wishlist