DEV#1: Welcome Astro to the Team!

Wed Feb 04

A post on integrating Astro to this blog and a list of considerations made while migrating away from Next.js and React

During my break from blogging in January, there were multiple things running through my head. Some things were related to my studies, especially my upcoming graduation thesis. Somethings just wouldn’t work out the way that I had intended (something to be expected I guess). Other things were about the next step after graduating, when do I move out of my place, what should I take with me and what should I throw away. There were a lot of things that bugged me during this period, and that also included my direction with this blog.

What’s Wrong with this Blog?

There’s nothing wrong with the tech-stack. I used the most popular framework (NextJS) and React (UI Components). Radix-UI and Lucide-React were added as well to simplify UI responsibilities. But none of it really felt right.

This project, journal, study diary, whatever you want to call it, is in essence a blog. A blog that makes my thoughts and comments, and even the code snippets, public for everyone to see. No fancy interactables, no API calls to anything, no complicated server and client side compiling. If a person comes it, they click a post, and get right onto reading it. So the tech-stack that I had felt like overkill.

Here comes Astro.

I wanted something simple, something that allowed me to write a post, commit, and deploy it directly to my blog. I wanted something lightweight, minus all the complexities and over-the-top features that NextJS had. But also I wanted something modern, and streamlined for my exact purpose - to write blog posts. And after much deliberation, I was left with Astro, a framework catered towards content-driven websites.

What’s different?

As mentioned before, Astro is a content-driven framework. And most important of all, it supports markdown by default. I think this is the sole reason why I decided to choose this over what I had previously. Also, this will get rid of all that fluff NextJS forces on its projects.

Final note

This migration will be pretty short, but I wanted to challenge myself to read the documents properly while doing this migration. So a lot of reading and following the documentation initially, but once I get comfrotable, it should be a breeze to add more customizations!