I do find myself (very occasionally) in the need for a personal/professional website, mostly to add a reminder to my future-self of my accomplishments but there are also (infrequent) occasions when I am working on something and make a discovery that I think is worthwhile sharing. One thing that prevents me from doing such things is that I am not a fan of website development.
Between 1997-2007 (ish), I made a lot of websites and I deplored the entire experience every single time. Since then, static site generators (SSG) have become more prevalent. In fact, a couple of years ago I embarked on my first SSG-based website using Svelte. The site itself was a network rendering solution (à la Deadline) using AWS. Svelte was used as a front-end for users to upload Modo scenes so that a AWS back-end (which was spun up on demand via rain) could speedily render the scene with Modo’s mPath renderer. It all worked great!
At the time, Svelte appeared to be morphing into Svelte Kit and all my attempts to get Svelte Kit to play nicely with vite failed miserably. I did experiment with other frameworks like Vue, Angular, Jekyll but there is a learning curve to all of these and there is still too much web-related aspects to them, so I pretty much walked away from the exercise as my needs for a website were not that demanding.
Years later at work, I was automating the conversion of the project’s RST-based documentation into markdown and a colleague told me about Astro, which looked like it fits my criteria of focusing on content and less about web things and package manager related shenanigans, especially given the Astro Nano template. So I thought I would try it and see how the exercise goes.