Launching my personal site!

It’s finally live! My own corner of the web.

Built using:

• AstroWind: as a frontend template for Astro
• Cloudflare: to host the page
• Supabase: for auth and database storage

Why I built it

I wanted a fun project during my parental leave. Something to work on while the little one sleeps.

I wanted something that was mine, but still small enough that I could actually finish it during nap windows. I also wanted to try out some free cloud tools while I were at it!

Cloudflare and Astro

I liked the idea of using Astro because it excels at content-driven websites. It also pairs nicely with Cloudflare, which has very generous free hosting options for static content.

One thing I thought was very neat was how easily I could integrate it with GitHub and set up continuous deployments on push. I also like the idea of setting up a scheduled build, since that pairs well with Astro creating static pages from Supabase data during the build step.

It also gives me a kind of delayed publishing if I set up builds once per day.

The site is intentionally slow to change. It sounds like a limitation, but for this kind of project it is almost a feature.

Supabase

I wanted to try mixing different services, as long as they each gave me something worthwhile. Supabase did just that.

The Auth and RLS security has been a breeze to work with, and everything has mostly just worked. I am very happy with the choice right now, but someday I would also like to try keeping a site Cloudflare-only to get a feel for what that experience is like.

Admin area

I wanted an admin area so I can post directly from the site without having to rely on pushing to Git. I am more likely to post if I can do it on the go.

This has proven to be a bit more rigid while keeping most of the page static, but still doable. A clean /posts/{id}/edit route would have been nicer, but a query string will do for now since it fits the static deployment model better.

Lesson of the day

There is a big difference between hosting with Cloudflare Pages and Workers.

Pages were easier to get up and running for this first static version. Workers seem worth exploring later if I want a more dynamic setup.

The hardest part was not building the page itself, but understanding where each piece of code runs: build time, browser time, or Cloudflare runtime.

What’s next?

Clearly the page is not done, but it is a start.

Up next:

• A real contact form that works
• Trying to make the site work with Workers instead of Pages on Cloudflare
• Automating rebuilds
• Preview functionality for posts before publishing
• Image uploading, so I can host my images as well

Cover photo by NASA on Unsplash.