New Writing Website

I have moved my fiction writing from this site to a new one which you can find by hitting Writing⁠ at the top menu. Whilst the blog isn’t super formal (it is a blog after all) it also isn’t that personal, and is mostly focused on professional work, i.e. Statistics, Computing, etc. With this in mind, I decided to divest my personal writing (call it Prose if you wish) and shifted it into a new site. I also wanted to try Astro and found a very cool theme which was the last bit of auto-pressure I needed. I moved most of my pieces from this site there, and renamed “Prose” to “Essays” to more accurately reflect that page’s content. The writing site isn’t just launching with the pieces from this site though—it has something I’ve been working on and am excited to write more about. It’s a project (collection of short stories? book to be?) I call Uni Days. I’ve decided to write (moreso publish) it in public, in part so it is easier for me to share with certain people. But might as well let the open internet have at it too.

Astro is interesting. I like the component approach. I rather fancy the theme, but I know that its rather heavy and chock full of JS—if I didn’t care about that, my main site would be Astro with erudite⁠. I’ve been hacking away at the site with LLMs in “Agent” mode through Zed; I’ve had good results so far. Astro, and all web dev really, is one of those things where I don’t really want to learn and can easily check the output. Performance may be compromised, and I’ll take a look at that later, but for now I’ve found it very easy to change the theme to better suit what I have in mind. I’m not using most of its features though, so I think I should reduce dependencies at some point in the near future. Hugo builds are much faster than Astros, and I’m spoiled because of that.

I try to be security and performance conscious—the base theme for this website is quite lightweight and has no JS built in and all that. I have layered some stuff atop that and have loosened the site’s security posture a little but it still clocks in at around 35kb and is secure. The font I use on the other site clocks in at 102.4kb. I am probably doing something wrong (and could rely on builtin fonts, like this site) but it is still crazy how large the other site is. Its nice to be able to have a little more room and feel less worried about security and performance though; the other site looks a lot better. I’ve stripped out most of the features that would make it usable instead of the current site’s theme (code blocks, callouts, etc.) and am trying to use as little JS as I can. But again, bit more relaxed, so I can have some nicer trappings.

I have been vibe-coding, so I don’t understand anything more about Astro—I won’t pretend that I’ve learned much. If I want to make even the simplest changes like centering a div, I’m going to put that in my next set of commands for the Agent. However, I don’t care? I’m not gonna do professional web dev, and I’m not going to change the theme once its done—all I do then is add content. And even if I wanted changes, I could then properly learn the thing, or just rely again on a LLM. I have been meaning to write about vibe coding and LLM assistance for a long time now, so maybe that post will come out sometimes soon. I have lots of Thoughts, and using agents has been very interesting.