After a decade on Tumblr, I’ve moved this blog to Astro hosted on Cloudflare Pages.

Astro is static site generator written in JavaScript. Its similar to Jekyll or Hugo. Content is generated from Markdown files, but JSX components are used to build HTML, rather than templates.

For years, the standard way to build HTML in a web app was with templates. HTML documents are large and complex enough that building them in code quickly becomes unwieldy. Previous efforts, like Python’s ElementTree tried to make this manageable, but code using this approach is full of boilerplate. JSX puts XML-like tag syntax directly into the language. Building documents in code means everything is just an expression. This improves over templates (and mixed-mode text generation languages like PHP) because syntax errors are caught by the compiler, expressions are composable, and they can be generated and manipulated programmatically. For example, we can map a JSX function over a collection. Components are essentially functions that return JSX expressions, so we can use them to create reusable snippets of HTML, like a page header.

Initially I moved the blog to Jekyll. Jekyll is simple, flexible and has stood the test of time. Once I started playing with Astro however, I remembered how much nicer JSX is to work with. I also wanted to use Tailwind CSS. Jekyll is starting to get a bit old and the community is less active. There’s no simple Tailwind integration story. Customising Jekyll’s default theme was straightforward, but building a theme from scratch in Tailwind was even easier. (Which is due to a great extent to my extremely minimalist design approach.)

Static site generators are great. They’re fast. The content can be hosted anywhere. The repo + workers + static hosting model has proliferated, with a ton of great providers. When the web first started to grow in popularity, we built HTML pages by hand (in my case, in Notepad). Then we dynamically generated pages with CGI scripts, then PHP, then Rails, then many other tools. It was more than 15 years before Jekyll made static site generation popular. This is kind of crazy. Way back in the 90s we had everything we needed. There were text-based blogging tools like Rael Dornfest’s Blosxom, but static generation just wasn’t a popular approach. Perhaps the key difference was that CI/CD had not yet become a common pattern. Deployment usually involved copying files to the server by FTP. Subversion was commonplace, scripting ubiquitous. We just didn’t wire the pieces up.