Bloggish!

Why I am writing my own blog implementation

2025-10-29, by DrFriendless

Well, after some hard slavery in the code mines, the blog is looking bloggish! I’ve been working through the Astro tutorial and it’s starting to click, so I’ve been racing off and doing my own thing a little. By the time you see this it will probably look a lot better so you’ll never know how primitive everything was.

That’s how I learn. I pay attention for a short time, then I think I get it and I start daydreaming about what I might do with that, then I completely lose track of what the teaching is telling me, and rush off and do a load of stuff. After some time I hit a brick wall and have to go look it up, only to discover that that was the next thing I was going to learn if I paid attention. On the other I’ve already understood all the other concepts.

So why am I coding my own blog? Several reasons:

• I hate WordPress
• I have temporarily misplaced the password to my WordPress account
• I have to host WordPress on its own virtual machine, which costs me money, whereas this blog is serverless
• WordPress is a massive target for hacking attempts - I witnessed this is my job where I was analysing which URLs were throwing 404 errors, and it was 99% attempts to hack the WordPress site we didn’t even run
• Blog comments are way too much work to police, as they are invariably ads for sex drugs or cryptocurrency scams or that sort of thing. If I do put comments into this blog I will make it spamproofish.

I think I like this Astro thing. Although I’d better not get too attached to it, it’s not the main focus of this site.

By the way I was previously using Gatsby, which is a React-based static site generator. I don’t really remember any React, and Gatsby was purchased by Netlify, so I decided to change that technology as well. So far it seems easy enough to use - it’s based on TypeScript which I’m a big fan of.

When I say the blog is “serverless”, what that means is that I am not paying for any sort of server to run it on. The pages are hosted on AWS S3, which is like a big hard drive in the cloud, and S3 does the web server bit for me.