AstroJS is my New Favourite Framework

21st of November, 2024

I’ve always liked using Blot.im. Its simplicity in handling Markdown posts for blogging is unparalleled. Still, I wanted to experiment with building my own stack, which led me to explore static site generators. I also had a few personal reservations about relying entirely on the service.

My earlier sites were built with Jekyll, the Ruby-based generator. I genuinely enjoyed working with Ruby because the language feels elegant and expressive. After stepping away from Jekyll for a while, I expected to return to something refreshed with modern improvements. The experience felt largely unchanged, and the tooling came across as a bit dated.

So I decided to switch to something else. After doing some research, I settled on using Astro. Astro is a static site builder that is framework-agnostic, so you can write in React, Vue, Preact, Svelte, or even Solid.

The setup required a bit more effort, though the flexibility made it worthwhile. A headless CMS is an option, but for now I’m keeping things simple. All updates, including Markdown blog posts, live in a GitHub repository and are deployed through Cloudflare Pages.

Anyone familiar with JavaScript frameworks will likely feel comfortable with the transition to Astro. One feature I’ve been enjoying a lot is page view transitions. I’m still exploring what’s possible, but for now a subtle fade transition works nicely.

Another pleasant surprise has been how well Astro pairs with the Zed editor. Overall, I’m really happy with Astro so far and I’m looking forward to adding more features as my site evolves.