Astro, Tailwind & Strawberry Pastries
Today, I feel lazy, tired, and somehow empty. Riding my bike helped a little, even though it was just slowly cruising on the city bike. Afterwards, I treated myself to a big fat pastry topped with strawberries. Even though I put myself on a diet some time ago, I just had to have it today. I've also been really indecisive today and yesterday. But before I slipped into this strange mood, I did make a decision.
You can see it on my website: things look different again. Okay, I know, I change things often, but this time it's not just a visual change — it's also different underneath: Astro. Before I moved to Bear, my blog was part of my website — built with Astro. Back then I even wrote a blog post about switching to Bear and why.
But lately, I've been missing Astro. There's something about it I just can't let go of, and I don't want to give it up so easily. I just wanted to check where things are at these days, and suddenly I saw that Astro 5 had been released. And then I simply couldn't resist and had to play around with it. I figured, as long as I don’t use it for the blog like last time, nothing can really go wrong. Because the dumb part about moving the blog was that I had to manually copy over every single blog entry into Bear — including tags and everything. So, the blog stays here on Bear, and I'm happy with that arrangement.
What's new on my site then?
First of all, I fell in love with a developer portfolio theme (https://devidev.io/). Totally my style, I just had to “slightly” adapt it to fit me. I'll be honest: it didn’t all go smoothly. But the main issues I had were mostly about integrating Markdown (which worked locally but failed during build) and that cursed Tailwind. I just can’t warm up to CSS frameworks and have always avoided them as much as possible.
During my training, we briefly touched on Bootstrap — just to get to know it, using it wasn't mandatory — and it only confirmed my stance. I threw all that Bootstrap shebang out the window and wrote pure CSS instead. I wish it had been that easy with this Astro theme too, but the whole layout is based on Tailwind classes, and if I removed them all, I’d only make life harder for myself. So I tried to override them, add new classes, and — yes — I deleted a few.
Why I hate CSS frameworks
- Sure, the CSS gets shorter, but the HTML ends up stuffed with class names
- The class names aren’t always intuitive
p-8 md:p-6 md:w-2/5!? and I don’t even know what’s happening there - If I want to change something via Tailwind or Bootstrap, I first have to search for it — and then it only might be kind of what I’m looking for while...
- ...I could’ve written the CSS myself in that time
- It all just makes customization and unique design needlessly complicated
Okay, rant over.
Another thing that's new is the log. Well, it’s not entirely new — I used it in the last layout too. Back then, it was pulled into the HTML using JavaScript, but with Astro, I could drop the script entirely, and I think that’s the better solution. Now I’m also less worried about the length of the log, which keeps growing. Still, I’ll have to come up with a plan for it in the future.
See you next time!