In comes Astro

The thing I like most about Astro is the philosophy: content first, as little overhead as possible. Most pages on a personal site don't need to do anything fancy. They just need to load fast and be easy to read. Astro is built around that idea. It generates clean, static HTML and keeps things lightweight by default.

I'd been experimenting with it for a while before committing to it for this site, and the experience stuck with me. Writing pages and blog posts in Astro feels direct and uncomplicated. The routing is simple. The build is fast. And the performance results speak for themselves. With pages load almost instantly.

It also scales nicely if I ever want to add something more interactive later. But for now, fast and simple is exactly what I was after.

Contentful as the headless CMS

Once I settled on Astro, the question was where to actually manage and write my content.

Astro works perfectly well with plain Markdown files stored alongside your code. And I did consider that. But I write on different devices and I wanted a proper editing environment I could open from anywhere. In a browser tab, not a code editor.

That's where Contentful comes in. It's a headless CMS, which means it's purely focused on managing content. You write and organise your content there, and your website pulls it in during the build process. The result is a clean separation that just makes sense: Contentful is where I write, Astro is what gets published.

The joy of writing again

When I want to publish something, I open Contentful, write my post, and hit publish. That's it. The site rebuilds itself automatically and the new post is live within a minute.

I love it when it's that simple.

After years away from blogging, having a setup that genuinely gets out of the way has made all the difference. No server to tend to, no plugins demanding attention. Just a modern setup that works in getting articles published.

Stay tuned for new content.