In comes Astro

Ever since Astro came on my radar in 2023, I wanted to revive a personal blog. A place where I can share insights and experiments. I gave a talk about Astro at iO at the end of 2024, outlining the advantages of building on this stack.

Fast-loading content via clean static HTML is all I want for this type of content blog. A content-first approach with little overhead.

Building sites via Astro feels direct and uncomplicated. The routing is simple, build speed is excellent. I could have gone for Markdown files as a lightweight solution, but I've integrated it with a headless CMS.

Contentful as the headless CMS

That's where Contentful comes in. 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. Publishing a post in Contentful triggers a deploy to Netlify via a webhook.

Bookmarks

In the past I relied heavily on del.icio.us for managing my bookmarks. But ever since that website went down, I've struggled with organising my bookmarks in one place. Therefore, I set up a content type in Contentful for managing and publishing them here. Advanced filtering is something I will add later on.

I've even made a custom integration fetching the repos I star on GitHub and my Strava and Last.fm stats 🤓

The joy of writing again

When I want to publish something, either an article or a bookmark, I open Contentful, add my post, and hit publish. That's it. The site rebuilds itself automatically and the new post is live instantly. 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 CMS updates, no plugins demanding attention. Just a modern setup that works in getting articles published.

Stay tuned for new content.