Over Engineering my Personal Website

How I rebuilt my site with Astro, GitHub Actions, and a decoupled content repo — just for the fun of it.

You can read the full post for free here.

I’m planning to launch two or three websites. The number keeps going up every day I spend tinkering. All of them are content-based with little to no interactivity.

Obviously, I went the static-site generator route — Jamstack. Astro, to be specific. Well, some of them are built using TanStack, but Astro will definitely rule this episode of my life.

Before going any further, I thought it would be wise to test the new setup on an existing website. That’s my personal website.

It’s not getting much traffic. It’s using Hugo, and I’ve been planning to switch to Astro for a long time. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to try the new setup.

Content on Its Own

The first rule in this setup is separating the content from the actual website codebase. I’ve been thinking about this since I started one of the other projects. I ran into a problem while managing a single repo with other contributors: they were writing, and I was working on the site — it didn’t go well for any of us.

So the content had to live outside the website code. This means two repositories for a single project. While others preach monorepos, I’m going the opposite direction.