Motivation

For a long time I had been thinking about creating a personal website, where I could document my programming experience. Recently I had a little more time (!) and finally finalised this goal.

Tools

Static website frontend web framework - Astro.js

I always strive for simplicity of the solution, it was the same in this situation. I wanted to create a static website and didn’t want to bother with the backend. Jamstack seemed to be the appropriate approach.

As a frontend framework I’ve chosen Astro.js that is the web framework for building content-driven websites.

Main advantages of Astro.js for blogging purposes:

• speed and performance: generated static websites contain minimal Javascript
• image optimisation: there are built-into Astro solutions for image optimisation
• SEO friendliness: built static sites are easily crawled by search engines
• content focused: content can be taken from various sources: markdown, mdx
• ease of integration with frontend frameworks: when more complex solutions is needed Astro can be easily integrated with popular frameworks like React, Vue, Svelte

Hosting and deployment

For hosting static websites CDN is an ideal solution and that is why the choice was simple. Cloudflare was chosen as a hosting solution for this blog.

Main advantages of Cloudflare for hosting static websites:

• global CDN: global network of servers brings your website closer to visitors reducing significantly load time
• easy deployment: CLI called wrangler makes deployment of websites to Cloudflare really easy
• smooth DNS management: DNS services provided by Cloudflare are intuitive and user friendly

Conclusion

It was really easy and nice to create a blogging website in this specific toolset. I can recommend this setup for other similar projects.