Setting Up a Blog with Astro

Sorry for the horrible AI generated art. I’ll probably replace it eventually.

Issues with Hugo

I tried (very briefly) to set up a blog with Hugo. I liked some of the themes I found, but I kept running into unexpected problems. Most of the themes weren’t well documented, and the fault of my less than favorable experience seems to lie with the theme ecosystem rather than Hugo itself. The themes don’t appear to have any sort of standard, and many have additional dependencies. It felt like each theme was a new technology I needed to learn.

Move to Astro

Since my main goal was to get a blog up and running rather than to learn Hugo (or one of the themes for Hugo), I decided to give Astro a try, and I’m very glad I did! It was pretty straightforward to get this up and running, intuitive to edit an example site to do what I wanted, and it was very well documented!

Steps

1. I started by following the “Tutorial: Build a Blog” from the Astro docs. I made it roughly halfway through, and then started skimming instead of following along. Then I started looking at themes, and found one that seemed to fit the bill: Dante.
2. Since I had already set up my GitHub repo and Netlify app in the tutorial, I just deleted the directory and started a new project in the same place with the Dante theme.

npm create astro@latest -- --template JustGoodUI/dante-astro-theme

3. Then I force pushed my changes over the GitHub repo, and it worked!

This is really just a simple and short post to dip my toe in the blogging world. I intend to continue tweaking this setup and slowly adding to the blog. The structure of the blog may change significantly over the next few months as I tweak the theme and add more content. Hope to see you next time!