That didn't take long

Less than two weeks ago, I launched JeffCaldwell.is after building everything with SvelteKit. I was happy with the design and SvelteKit made building everything a breeze. So why did I rebuild it so quickly?

When I was finished with the first iteration of this site, I excitedly showed it to whoever would humor me. My fellow students in the CS program told me how great it looked and complimented me on the color scheme. My fiancee, bless her, gave me the requisite compliments. Then I showed it to my brother, a mechanic.

“It lacks pizzaz,” he said.

I trust my brother. He and I have an honest relationship. He’s not a designer or a developer and that allows me the opportunity to hear from someone who will tell me what he thinks without fear that he’ll hurt my feelings. He’s also not steeped in all of the common design trends on the web. What’s that mean to me?

It means I should listen.

It happened to be spring break and, for once, I took a week off of work at the same time school was out. I wanted to give Astro 2.0 a shot, so I started working on a new landing page. Before long I was deep into rewriting the whole site and here we are.

Rebuilding everything was, more or less, very straightforward. Astro’s contributors should definitely be congratulated on the phenomenal job they’ve done in making a tool that’s so intuitive and comprehensive. I’m not going to make any comparisons to Svelte/SvelteKit other than the documentation. The Astro docs are second-to-none, while I’ve always felt that the Svelte docs are a little lacking.

There’s still more to do. I need to work out Open Graph image generation and I’d like to start taking part in the IndieWeb for real by adding webmentions and syndication. There’s still so much to do!

I’m really looking forward to it.