Astro Experiments

For a long while, I have wanted my own personal website. I actually wanted to write it from the ground up, but in the end I decided to go with a different route. Ultimately, this decision stemmed from a combination of two factors: time, and knowledge.

In the case of time, I really need to get this site up and running. So rather than spend weeks putting together all of the things necessary to have a good looking website, I decided to use an already existing pipeline. So far, I’m impressed with how much better it looks than my first attempt!

Regarding knowledge: at the moment, I don’t have all the knowledge necessary to both build each aspect of a website, or to have a coherent and attractive final product. That will come with time and practice, I hope.

After doing a lot of studying up on the subject, I decided to change my website from running my own custom setup to running with Astro. Here’s a basic overview of what I experienced:

First Steps

Starting out, I downloaded Astro and puttered around in the setup process for a bit, just to get my bearings. After familiarizing myself with the absolute basics, I checked out the themes on Astro’s website and ended on the Astrofy theme. There really wasn’t any special reason I chose it. It is simple, but matched all of the criteria I had for a personal website.

Turns out, the theme I chose requires some knowledge of Tailwind CSS, so that was a fun foray. Also, it did take a bit to figure out how to get the blog-posts to work the way I wanted.

I am using Obsidian to write blog-posts in Markdown, then Astro takes them and converts them to HTML. However, I hit a learning curve when trying to get all of Obsidian’s formatting to align with how it gets rendered on the website. Still haven’t pinned that one down yet. But, we’ll get there eventually.

In the end, I changed a bit of the layout and removed most of the things that didn’t apply to my situation. Now, I have what I consider to be a decent layout that should hopefully be digestible to visitors.

At the moment, I have sections for blog-posts, my CV, and various projects I have been working on. Hopefully, that catches all that I want to publish so far.

Here’s to hoping this works out!