Why Not?

I’ve tried making personal site a few times now with Wordpress, Jekyll, and even just HTML/CSS/JS. I felt like Wordpress wasn’t teaching me enough, Jekyll was too theme driven, and HTML/CSS/JS was not cool enough. After some reading, I found Astro which fit what I was looking for to create something for myself.

I’m not a “developer”, but I feel like I know more than the average joe because of my job and skillset. So I wanted my site to not only be a place that I can post my thoughts and notes, but also something where I can learn more technical skills over time. I felt that Astro was a good balance of simplicity to get started and room for improvement and added complexity later on.

Plus the Astro tutorial is literally building a blog, so I used that as my jump off point.

My Workflow

I setup an old laptop with Mint XFCE. I know enough about Linux to get by but using it as a development tool should further increase my confidence with the OS. I use Visual Studio Code as my editor as I’m most familiar with it and don’t see a need to learn something else at this time.

My domain and site is hosted with Namecheap for no other reason except it’s been there since I purchased it. There’s better hosting out there but Namecheap is… well it’s cheaper than others and I enjoy not paying a fortune for hosting.

Once my site is updated, I push my changes to Github which seems to be the ‘correct’ way to do projects like this. I’m not an expert in Github but I do see the benefits of it. I feel more confident that my progress is saved easily in an offsite area that I can utilize even if my laptop decides to explode.

I have a script made that runs npm run build and then updates my hosting server with the resulting /dist folder which is running CPanel. I simply asked Gemini to make it for me, which brings me to…

The Use of AI with Astro

Since I’m trying to use this as a learning tool, I want to limit the use of AI tools when building this site. I went through the Astro tutorial and used some of those lessons to build the basics of this site. I also used Gemini and ChatGPT to help me style a few things as site design is really low on my knowledge list. But I will say that all of the content on this site will be by my own hand, not generated by AI. I’m not creating this site for ‘views’ and ‘traffic’, but for my own enjoyment and more of the mentality of ‘If you build it, they will come.’

That’s not to say that I won’t use AI to build new features and organization within Astro. I think AI has changed the landscape of development and not using it effectively is a detriment. I’m not against AI but I do think that content should continue to be written by humans.

Future Plans

Outside of the blog of my perosnal journeys, I hope to continue my studies with Astro, which seems to bleed in to other topcis like React and Angular as far as what Astro has to offer. I think one day I’d like to move to Angular as it seems like a great challenge. I think it’s overkill for the site I have now but maybe in the future I’ll change to it.

My first goal is to establish my site and create a few blog posts to establish the site. I also have plans to create a ‘work dashboard’ using something else, such as React, to provide a tool that would assist me with my day job.

Onwards

I hope this project is fruitful not only for me but for the reader as well. I want this site to provide some learning opportunities for me but if it helps another reader on this crazy world wide web, then so much the better. Thanks for reading this far and let’s see how far Astro takes us on this journey!

—Jared P.