Notes
Astro v3
My third time with Astro. Astro has moved to v3. So this is my third attempt: the first was v1, the second was v2, and now this. Each time I only got as far as listing posts and then lost interest, so the blog never got updated.
The thing that bothered me most was image handling in Markdown:
Astro required custom scripts to load images via relative paths.
This may not be unique to Astro, but as a static site generator,
not resolving paths for static files outside the public
directory felt inadequate and drained my motivation.
However, since v3 was released, I expected some improvements and started rebuilding the blog.
As you can see, the image above loads via the relative path
./images/how-standards-proliferate.png, and it also appears to be
converted to WebP. While writing this article, I also noticed that
extra spaces inserted after line breaks when converting Markdown to HTML
for CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) text no longer occur by default.
Previously I had to use a plugin like
purefun/remark-join-cjk-lines
to remove those spaces, but that is no longer necessary.
With version 3, Astro seems mature enough to meet most general needs. Still, there were a few things I wanted to do in this build that I could not accomplish.
Libraries that caught my attention
I noted some libraries I discovered while building this blog but failed to adopt.
Syntax highlighting
Code Hike was a library that interested me last time rather than this time.
It still did not seem to support Astro, so I skipped it.
Starry Night is the open-source version of a project that was developed
inside GitHub. There appears to be a plugin as well, and if it works,
it should display source code nicely. I tried disabling Shiki in
astro.config.mjs and adding it as a rehype plugin, but it did not work.
I want to try again after the blog setup settles down.
Impressions
I implemented listing posts and rendering content, and then deployed it. Given that I had touched Astro before and that it requires little learning if you only need static site generation, I finished it in about half a day.
I only implemented the bare minimum, so while writing articles I want to keep adding features going forward.