AstroJS is my New Favourite Framework

I love blot.im—it’s simple and fits perfectly into my publishing workflow. But I wanted to build my own stack, so I started exploring static site generators. I also had some personal reservations about relying on the service.

My old sites were built with Jekyll, a Ruby-based static site generator. I love Ruby—it’s such an elegant language. Coming back to Jekyll after a long break, I expected to see some neat, modern updates.

But there weren’t any. And to be fair, Jekyll gets the job done and its simplicity is unparalleled.

I guess the allure of something new and shiny is too strong. Nevertheless, I did some research, and decided to go with AstroJS over Jekyll.

It’s definitely not as easy to set up. I know I could use a headless CMS, but for now, all my updates—including blog posts (using markdown!)—are pushed through a GitHub repo and published to Cloudflare Pages which I felt is much better due to being able to use a private repository.

If you’re familiar with JavaScript or frameworks in general, the transition to AstroJS is pretty smooth. I did have to manually set up a few extras—like compiling SASS and formatting dates with DayJS—but I got the site up and running with a fresh, modern design.

My favourite feature so far is definitely page view transitions. I’m still figuring out how to use them, but for now, a simple fade transition is more than enough!

Oh and AstroJS integrates beautifully with Zed editor. Ultimately, I am quite content with AstroJS so far and I hope to explore adding more features to my personal site.