👋🏼 Howdy world!

Photograph of meditating figure with sign that reads Howdy by Mick Haupt via Unsplash

My last blog was built with Gatsby and although that was nice — it was complete overkill. I found that returning and updating dependencies in package.json was an absolutely nightmare. Although I liked the layout, I didn’t love it. I had been working with React for years up until that point in time but something felt off.

Back when I wrote 👋🏼 Hello World Again I talked about how my prior blogs were in WordPress. Matter of fact, as of Dec 25, 2021 you can see that old website in it’s broken state on an old WP-Engine server. In the future, if you click on that link it may bring you back right here. After all, that site is broken. I do plan to scape the old site’s blog posts and bring them over as I have from my prior Gatsby site.

What’s nice is the Gatsby site’s blog posts were written in Markdown which had taken the world by storm at that time. That came in handy when it came ot migrating to this platform.

Astro-unding

I have rebuilt my personal site from the ground up with Astro and Tailwind 3.0 hosted on Netlify. This is an incredibly small framework. It has Markdown capabilities built in. I love it’s simplicity. It has allowed me to do what I love — write HTML and CSS. Yes, I can do more but for now, I need little dynamic JavaScript. Focus is on the content and accessibility, but build tooling and a laundry list of dependencies.

Context is important

There are some interesting technologies out there. For instance, I really enjoy Polywork and my Changelog. This service is nice for quick updates. Blog posts are for longer form material. That is how I will be walking forward. Look forward to my musings on hobbies from photography and videography, my life with my wonderful wife and dog and my insights from working on the web professionally for over 15 years. Until then. Happy holidays! I wish you all the best in 2022!