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Rebuilding this site with Astro

#meta#astro

I rebuilt this site again. It looks the same — same typography-first theme, same pages — but everything underneath is different. Jekyll is out, Astro is in. The output is still plain static HTML on GitHub Pages at vajradevam.in, just produced by a saner pipeline.

Why leave Jekyll?

Nothing was broken, exactly. But the project had accumulated the usual Jekyll cruft: _layouts, _includes, _data, root-level blog.html / tags.html / projects.html, a Gemfile with vendor/bundle weighing 84 MB locally, a one-off generate.js plus a GitHub Action just to list PDFs, and client-side fallbacks hitting the GitHub API. Layout and structure were the mess, not the design.

Astro fits this site well: content collections for the blog, TypeScript data files instead of YAML sprawl, file-based routing, zero JavaScript by default, and static output that deploys to Pages via the official deploy-pages action. No Ruby toolchain, no vendor/, no _site/ committed confusion.

What changed

  • Posts moved from _posts/YYYY-MM-DD-slug.md to src/content/blog/slug.md, with the date living in frontmatter as pubDate. A Zod schema in src/content.config.ts validates every post.
  • Data moved from _data/*.yml to typed src/data/*.ts — projects, publications, patents, experience, skills, now, categories.
  • Layouts are src/layouts/Base.astro, Page.astro, and Post.astro instead of Liquid templates. Components are just Nav.astro and Footer.astro.
  • Writings got the biggest simplification. PDFs live in public/writings/ and the page reads that directory at build time with node:fs. No list.json, no extra workflow, no API fallback.
  • Highlighting switched from Rouge to Shiki (github-dark). Container styling stayed in src/styles/global.css.
  • Feeds: canonical /rss.xml, with /feed.xml kept as an alias so old subscribers don’t break. Sitemap is automatic.

Old URLs are preserved: /blog/<slug>/, /tags/#<tag>, /projects/, /research/, /writings/.

Writing a post now

Create src/content/blog/<slug>.md:

---
title: "Your title here"
pubDate: 2026-10-08
tags: [technical, c]
description: "A one-line summary shown in the post list."
---

Your post body goes here, in Markdown.

Fenced code blocks get Shiki highlighting. Add math: true to the frontmatter on posts that need LaTeX, and MathJax loads only there.

Push to master and the deploy action builds (npm ci + npm run build) and publishes dist/. Local preview is npm run dev at http://localhost:4321 — note the port change from Jekyll’s 4000.

Same words, less machinery. That’s the whole point.

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