First Impressions of Astro

Introduction

I’ve been using Astro for a two days now and I am having fun.

Current Features

I’ve built a blog that converts markdown files into blog posts. Additionally, I’ve developed a tag page that displays all blog posts linked to a specific tag. There’s also a tag cloud feature that presents all tags in a cloud format. Moreover, I’ve created a welcome page that features the latest blog post. Finally, I’ve implemented a 404 page to manage error handling.

Styling

I am not using Style tags but have explored it a little. So far Im only using Tailwind directly in the HTML.

Layouts

BaseLayout is wrapping all my pages, and has a <Header> and <Footer> component. BlogPost is a layout for blog posts, and has a <Content> (from Astro) component.

Components

I have created a TagCloud component that takes in all the tags and renders them as a cloud of tags. I have created a BlogCard component that takes in a blog post and renders it as a blog post. I have created a Tags component that shows the tags of a blog post (takes in tags from frontmatter).

Deployment

I have deployed my blog to Netlify, and added a custom domain. So far Netlify has been a simple setup, the only issue is that it fails about every second time i push to the repo. The rest of the setup was quick and easy. SSR has been enabled, adding a domain from another party went smoothly (only a couple clicks).

Conclusion

I am having fun with Astro, and I am looking forward to building more with it.