Rewriting my personal site in Astro.
Jun 17, 2025Over the years my personal site has gone through many iterations. I wish I still had my original site from circa 2005. It wasn’t accessible on the internet (I was 11) and I had just learned the basics of HTML and CSS and I was so proud of myself. It had an awesome marque banner at the top, a list of my favorite links on the side, a few of my favorite pokemon, and something about my dog Waldo. I wish I had a screenshot of it, but alas, it is lost to time.
My most recent version was a simple React app built with Next.js and Tailwind CSS. It wasn’t anything special at all, just a minimalist business-card style site. I had written some blog posts but had never gotten around to wiring them up on my site.
I recently started a new job, and learned that I’ll be working within the Astro framework. I had heard of Astro before, but never really looked into it. I decided to take the opportunity to rewrite my personal site in Astro, and I’m really enjoying it so far.
I guess I just had my head in the sand, but I had no idea how incredible Astro is. Zero JS by default, the ability to use any framework I want, and a great developer experience. That’s just the tip of the iceberg - I haven’t even begun to look into the islands architecture, but I can already tell that it’s going to be a game-changer for future projects.
I’ve wired up MDX support for past blogs, for work blogs, and for various other projects. Experiences have varied but Astro’s MDX support is hands-down the best experience I’ve had so far. Everything just works so nicely out of the box - I really was expecting to spent more time tinkering with configs.
Astro’s image optimization is fantastic. I can import images directly into my MDX files, and Astro will automatically optimize them for me. The nextjs Image component is a real pain to work with, so I was a bit worried about how Astro would handle images. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Astro’s image optimization is incredibly easy to use and works great.
It’s only been a few hours, but rebuilding my personal site in Astro has been a great experience so far. I’m excited to see what else I can do with it, and I’m looking forward to learning more about the framework. If you’re looking for a new framework to try out, I highly recommend giving Astro a shot.