Hello! Welcome to my blog!
Hello, everybody! Welcome to my brand new blog powered by Vercel and the awesome work of Astro Micro.
Blog Tech Stack — An Overview
This website is built on the amazing work of Trevor Lee and his Astro Micro template for the awesome JavaScript framework Astro. Comments are powered by Giscus and run on GitHub Discussions, hosting is provided by Vercel, and domains/DNS are handled by Cloudflare.
Astro Micro
Astro Micro is an awesome little template built on the Astro framework that allows you to create responsive, beautiful blogs such as this one with minimal programming knowledge.
I found this template whilst scrolling through the Vercel templates options for a blog as I wanted to try writing a blog again but without having to build anything from scratch. After looking through a few demos I opted for Astro Micro and I’m glad I did, it’s incredibly easy to use and really beautiful. I’m hopeless at JavaScipt/TypeScript and can write some basic HTML and CSS and I still managed to get this running. It’s quite easy to get going with Astro Micro.
Astro doesn’t need an introduction, it’s an amazing framework that I know shockingly little about. What I do know is that it’s really fast, really powerful and helps you make really pretty blogs like this one. :)
Giscus
Giscus comes with Astro Micro as standard and until I used Astro Micro here I had never even heard of it before but I do wish I found it sooner.
It’s shockingly simple to set up. All you do is go onto their homepage and go through the configuration steps. It honestly took me no more than a couple of minutes to set up and tweak some configurations in Astro Micro before it was up and running exactly how I wanted it.
Giscus is super customisable to fit your preferences, you can change how it scans for discussions, the languages it uses, the discussions it uses, the way it displays everything, the theming it uses and much more. It is an awesome tool and I can’t wait to use it again in future projects.
Vercel
I’ve used Vercel in many, many projects before this one. And to be honest, my feelings on it are a bit mixed.
On one hand, it has some amazing, really polished features like its template selection that allowed me to not only discover Astro Micro but also deploy it in no joke, 33 seconds.
Whilst some of the features Vercel offers are truly amazing, it’s not perfect. Vercel is also quite keen on monetising its platform. Notable examples of this include heavily recommending features that are initially free but have limitations that require a paid upgrade but you aren’t always informed of until after you need said upgrades. In fairness though, a lot of the industry doesthis too, including Netlify, but it’s still behaviour that puts me off wanting to use it forever.
In the future, I’d like to migrate this to Cloudflare Pages which Astro Micro appears to have had some minor issues with in the past but hopefully, those should be cleared now.
Cloudflare
Cloudflare needs no introduction. It’s an amazing company with an extremely generous free tier that has allowed many hobbyists like myself to experiment with all sorts of cool tools.
It has had some controversies with things like its moderation and billing practices over the years (for more info, see the controversies surrounding their handling of kiwifarms) and also its many, many outages but in my opinion, those are far outweighed by the benefits of Cloudflare.
Cloudflare offers loads of amazing free products like their DNS management services, also their DDoS protection that has saved many servers of mine, many times. Also, their very generous free tiers of Cloudflare Pages and Cloudflare Workers have allowed me to experiment with hosting websites and little projects all with incredible speed, scalability and reliability.
Some people have concerns that all the people flocking to Cloudflare means that the internet is centralising itself to a few key companies, but that’s a can of worms I’ll deal with at a later date.
Development Tools — How I’m Working On This Blog
Here I’ll share the tools and technologies I’m using to develop this blog and truly make it my own.
Visual Studio Code
There’s no denying that Visual Studio Code is an amazing code editor. I’ve used it for years and genuinely love it.
It’s so extensible with amazing extensions such as Live Share allowing me to share my Work In Progress projects with my friends to gather feedback, and also things like the IntelliSense and integrations with things like Git and Windows Subsystem for Linux.
Admittedly, I’m quite new to WSL but I’d love to explore it in the future and use it to build and test all sorts of cool things on Linux, particularly Ubuntu, my main server OS of choice for my VPS servers.
Back to Visual Studio Code though, it’s also a really pretty code editor and it has so many features and I don’t even know what half of them do yet. I can’t wait to explore more and unleash its full potential.
Git/GitHub Desktop
I’ve split this in two because I often jump between Git through Visual Studio Code and the dedicated GitHub Desktop application for managing Git repositories.
Unfortunately, I’ve not really delved into command-line Git and I don’t have any intention of doing so for as long as I can get away with it. I like the Visual Studio Code Source Control options and GitHub Desktop because they’re pretty and easy to understand.
Why do I use both? I don’t know. I prefer GitHub Desktop for cloning repos but then Visual Studio Code’s implementation for actually committing changes and pushing them to GitHub.
Regardless though, I love both very much and I can’t wait to use them both for a long time to come.
Closing Thoughts
While I am familiar with some of the tools this new blog uses, I am also unfamiliar with just as many more.
Hopefully this new undertaking will allow me to explore all the world of writing blogs, building websites and writing JavaScript has to offer. I’m very eager to learn what everything here has to offer and I’m super excited to explore what they can do.
Thanks for reading all of this, I hope it wasn’t too much of a drag. 😂
-Ruaridh