How I Built This Site / Dean Cureton

first iteration (next.js)

This website began as a Next.js and Markdown blog. When I began building it, my web development skills were quite outdated, so this first attempt was mostly me learning what modern web development looked like.

I used

mdx-bundler for parsing markdown content
rehype / remark plugins to help with parsing
katex for math rendering
tailwind for styling

I quickly realized that Next was too advanced for this use case, and I needed something more streamlined. So, I migrated the site to Astro.

second iteration (astro)

Luckily, virtually everything I had set up with Next translated directly to Astro without any trouble. (Thanks npm!)

In this iteration, I added

sidenotes adapted from tufte.css
automatic table of contents adapted from kld.dev and Hakim El Hattab
the fonts:
- gambetta from fontshare and
- spline sans mono from google fonts
a force graph using d3.js
a post tagging system adapted from tailwind-astro-starting-blog
astro integrations to generate an rss feed, a sitemap, SEO tags, and a robots.txt file
netlify for deployment

I’ll update this post if I add more features to the site.