I built this website in April 2026 using Astro 6, Tailwind CSS 4 and MDX. My stack centers on a Vite 7-powered pipeline optimized with Terser and astro-compress. The equations are rendered using remark-math and rehype-katex. I also have a RSS feed with a beautiful xsl.
In late April, I’ve added /photos with some tweaks to css, along with a thumbnail renderer using the good old Canvas API for OpenGraph images and JSON-LD. This allows me to add a “share as image” button to my posts, which generates a thumbnail on the fly with the post title and a nice background. Of course /photos has its own RSS feed as well.
The entire lifecycle, from transforming content collections to final minification and deployment to GitHub Pages, is orchestrated via make utilizing exiftool and gh to ensure a lean, production-ready build. The unsung heroes include awk, xargs, find, and grep. I’ve opted to ship the site as a compressed binary artifact rather than loose files to the GitHub repo to provide a layer of mild obfuscation to deter casual scrapers and bots.
Rather than inheriting the legacy overhead of al-folio or similar, I spent three days engineering a custom solution tailored to my specific needs. The second iteration took 2 to 3 days as well. Building from scratch ensured total control over the stack, and while it took a few more days to iron out the finer details, I’m happy with the result. I hope you like it, too!