The Framework

Astro

Astro is an excellent framework for static site generation. It emphasizes speed and flexibility. Since websites can be incrementally rebuilt at-will when content changes, why not use static files?

”Why not React?”

React is, at this juncture, the default web framework. It’s excellent and I use it every day and have for many years. It can absolutely be used for a static website and I explored that, but found Astro to be a lot of fun to work with. React was fundamentally created to make interactive apps while Astro was fundamentally created to make contentful sites. Since I enjoy learning and believe in using the best tool for the job, why not try Astro?

”Why not WordPress?”

WordPress still manages a large chunk of internet content and I have had a lot of experience with it. We probably wouldn’t have all of the modern tooling and content management without the influence of WordPress. There are solutions to decouple WordPress as a content management system from the content presentation, but for a personal site, I wanted a system that did not require anything beyond static file hosting and which sufficiently included content separation as a built-in feature.

The Hosting

Cloudflare Workers

Cloudflare is an excellent service provider and Workers enables free static site hosting with effectively unlimited usage. It takes less time to set up Git integration to configure rebuilds on branch pushes than to finish a cup of coffee. The network reach and uptime is assuredly better than something I could provide. I really have no complaints whatsoever. Again, the importance of balance of ease-by-default with low-level control when needed is something Cloudflare seems to understand.