This site has been rewritten

   // updated :

Reasoning behind the rewrite of my site.

I have rewritten this site

The time has come to retire the design of my 2023 site and usher in this one.

This year’s design is likely to have a pretty decent tenure in the future. Text-based sites with no/minimal JS [0] have always felt both cozy and respectful to me as a user, so that’s the approach I took here. Let’s take a look at the differences:

λ ~/ diff 2023-site 2024-site
< NextJS
< React
< Vercel
---
> Astro
> Amplify
> AWS

I’m using AWS Amplify to handle hosting and deployments until I acquire some homelab hardware to self-host on. It’s free and easy.

My old site had no reason using NextJS and shipping out the nearly ~1MB of JS chunks for 98% text content. The motivations behind this choice was primarily 2 reasons:

  1. React comfortability
  2. Desire to spice up eventual blog posts with interactive components

Let’s quickly go over the logical flaws in these reasons:

  1. React comfortability

React is great for writing webapps, but using a fully featured JS framework and React metaframework for something that had about as much styling as a text file was a bit like hitting a nail with a 737. What’s great about Astro is I can include React components indepdendently if I want, without all the JS chunk mush that comes with writing the entire site in it.

Comfortability is also an excuse to not learn new stuff. I’ve been working to break the habit I have of learning a new thing and then using that thing everywhere and for everything and then abandoning it. Gotta be careful to not fall into the “Jack of All Trades, Master of None” trope.

If I really dig deep here, the real reason behind React was so that I could use ThreeJS to have a spinning TF2 sentry gun on my home page. Hell yeah.

  1. Desire to spice up eventual blog posts with interactive components

This would normally be valid apart from the fact that no blog posts outside of my 2023 rewrite post were published in 2023. But this time it’s different, and you can take that statement with confidence as I’m writing this in late March 2024 rather than New Years 2022. That automatically exempts it from New Year resolution status, so now it’s a promise :)

Astro, as previously stated, solves the component problem. Now all I gotta do is write.



[0] https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/