AARON ENDSLEY

“Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.” ― Douglas Wilson, Ploductivity: A Practical Theology of Work & Wealth

I have built this site over and over and over again. I have built this site in regular ole HTML, CSS, and Javascript, I’ve built it in Jquery and Bootstrap, ReactJS, GatsbyJS, Svelte, fill in the blank framework of the week. Everytime I have learned something new I’ve rebuilt this site. I always found something i did not like about the other tools I used to build previous iterations of this site. I needed to use the right tools for the right job.

Why is Astro the right tool for this site? The reason I think is because it makes things like building this blog less time consuming. It combines all the things i love about frameworks like Svelte, Vue, and React, while still feeling like simple HTML CSS and Javscript. Astro gets out of my way to allow me to create a simple site, all the benefits of awesome static site generators like gatsby without the hassle of having to set up various plugins, I’ve used Gatsby on other projects and its a good tool, but it is just not the best tool for a site this simple.

The Docs for Astro were extreamly simple to use, and the tutorials on the website make it very simple to learn how to use Astro. I did not know how to use Astro, I went through the blog tutorial they have on their site (here), and from there I was able to build my site from scratch after doing the tutorial for at most an hour and reading a little documentation. Overall I am impressed with astro and will be using it to build simple sites when it is the right tool for the job.

What do I like about Astro. The Simplicity. For the most basic use like static sites, it feels very easy to use. That someone could know just HTML, Javascript, and CSS and be able to work in Astro with little experience, is the benefit of using Astro.

If you are looking into Astro, definately give the blog tutorial a try. I felt like it gave me the baseline i needed to work and use Astro.