Layers

Another day with my head down, mostly. Going to rebuild the frontend of this site. A lot of our projects would benefit from being statically generated. A lot of the internet, I suspect. I spent some time today updating my Astro knowledge using this site's backend as a data source and I'm surprised by how quickly it builds. I have everything except my tag indexes (and search, obviously) statically building in less than 20 seconds. That's a lot of URLs. I'm trying to figure out a performant way to build tag indexes and I think I have one, but I have a lot of tags and some of those tags have a lot of posts.

The only thing I don't love about Astro's static stuff is how pagination works. Most of it is really good, but it doesn't let me generate a nice index for page 1. So I want / to be page 1, then /page/2 to be the effective start of my pagination, but Astro doesn't support that. I think I can come up with a workaround, but native would be preferable.

I'm also going to drop Tailwind; I just don't like it. I just prefer handwritten CSS. Tailwind feels so messy on here. I know a lot of that is probably down to my lack of experience but I don't really care to grow that experience. It has some cool stuff, but not enough to keep me interested. I gave it a fair shot!

Funnily enough, one of the most significant pieces of functionality on this site is my currently playing stuff. I could just lose it altogether but I'd rather not just yet. It seems like I can do it with Astro's server islands but I haven't fully looked into that yet. It's entirely possible that I've totally misunderstood what those are for and how they work in a static world! I guess we'll see at the weekend.