↖ Writing

Hi, RSS Club!

Hi there! Thank you for subscribing to my blog via RSS. For this very first edition of RSS club, I’ll talk a bit about some blog updates.

Blog migration

I recently moved my blog over from Astro to Nuxt.

Why move away from Astro?

After my website builds started failing, it felt easier to switch frameworks rather than debug the issue. There is a lot to love about Astro, but I had a few problems with it:

  1. Astro releases new versions so often. It’s great to see their release velocity, but for a blog I just want to “set it and forget it”. It’s stressful that I often have to update the package and change relevant code. I’m two major versions behind at this point! And I’m not alone: Fellow blogger Sean also talks about this issue with his Astro-based blog.
  2. Assets paths are weird. In order to use Astro’s image optimisation, you have to place your images in the assets/ folder, and reference them with a relative path. This lead to paths like ../../../../../assets/2023/04/breakpoint-indicator-screenshot.png in my blog posts. That’s ugly and error-prone.
  3. Because Astro is young, there isn’t good tooling support yet in Neovim. I wrote about a few steps to set it up. But neither formatting nor highlighting work reliably.

In summary, for my blog I want something that…

  1. Just works and requires little maintenance,
  2. and makes it easy to change existing code.

So, although it pains me to replace a simple static site generator with a JavaScript framework, I landed on Nuxt. Nuxt is what I work with every day in my day job, so I’m really familiar with it. It’s fast to troubleshoot issues. And it enables me to add some new features – like support for RSS club!

Styling tweaks

While migrating, I just slightly tweaked the code styles on the page. I added a subtle border, so that the white code background stands out more from the light pink site background. I also decreased the code font size:

Two version of the same website. The right version has a light grey border around the code box.Left: Before. Right: After.

I think these changes make the code stand out a bit more, instead of it just blending into the background.

The code is set in the Intel One Mono font. It’s supposed to be designed for maximum legibility, but in the context of the blog I find the font a bit too eccentric. I might change it to something more paired back in the future.

In summary

I love this idea of your website as a worry stone: Something that you can continously tweak without an expectation of it being “shipped” or “finished”. I hope that this migration makes it easier to write more, and to tweak the design of the site.

Thank you for reading, and for using RSS! You’re awesome.