Introduction

I’m well aware that I also own samsthings.org. However, the allure of owning a website with the TLD of .fish was too much. So, I’ll use this site as a more personal and general-purpose site while the old domain will be a strictly-portfolio version of this site.

The Astro framework

My main methods for web programming in the past have either been in plain html/css/js, or using full-stack server-side rendering with a framework like Laravel. The former was very low-level and annoying to interpret, while the latter was a maze of documentation, plugins and frameworks.

Astro finds a nice balance between these methods as you are structuring your site with an abstracted form of HTML suitable for pre-rendering, you are able to use tailwind for easier CSS, and Javascript can either be used to prerender or can be loaded at runtime alongside other frameworks such as Node.

To make the experience even more comfortable, you are able to define content collections that are automatically compiled and rendered at build-time. Instead of writing hundreds of blog posts manually you are instead able to define a renderer for the blog, and write the blog posts in markdown to be rendered later.

Hosting

Due to hosting fees and the ease of having a CI/CD pipeline managed for you, I decided to host the site on Gitlab Pages. Gitlab already has a template for Astro projects, so this was really simple to get set up.

However, Gitlab has a hard limit of 100mb per project for non-paying users. To get around this, I looked to the Hetzner server in Finland that I spun up for a custom VPN. I was able to transform this into a media server for hosting all of my site’s static content, and it is now located at media.slom.fish. Moreover, having a dedicated server for media hosting came in handy when I made my LastFM API aggregator script for this site’s music page. This simply runs on a cron job to fetch new listens nightly.