Hello! Just a short note about the tech powering this website.
Maybe you haven’t seen: Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, has been cozying up with Benjamin Netanyahu and regularly tweeting in support of Donald Trump. Obviously, I do not support any of this, and I don’t want Vercel to have my business (even if it was all free tier). I haven’t used Vercel or next.js for new projects for a long time, but this site, originally built in 2021/2022, was a relic of when I did. Today I migrated to Netlify, rewrote the site in Astro, and for good measure started hosting the code on Tangled instead of Github. Use tech you can feel good about.
In case you’re not familiar with any of the choices I made today:
- Astro is a web framework that focuses on content-driven websites. It’s particularly good at getting you a performant static website while letting you use all the modern TypeScript tooling you’re familiar with. You can even bring your frontend framework of choice (Alpine.js, React, Vue, Svelte, Solid, Preact) and build client-side components when you need them. (This site doesn’t need any.)
- Netlify is a cloud hosting platform that has been prominent in the JAMStack movement. I’ve used them for a few static client projects and been happy with it. If you were a Vercel user and liked the plug-and-play nature, you’ll likely find Netlify just as good, if not better.
- Tangled is a new social coding platform with great git hosting, built on atproto. It is one of the most exciting projects in the ATmosphere, and I’ve been looking for an excuse to try it out with something lightweight. Eventually, I’ll move Sill over there too, but that will be a larger operation.
Some quick notes on how today went:
- If you’re building a static site of some kind, moving from Vercel to Netlify couldn’t be easier. If all you want to do is take your site and move it, just create a Netlify account, connect your repository to a new project, and add your custom domain and adjust your DNS records. Then, delete your Vercel project. This part took me all of ten minutes. I’m hosting this on their free tier, which should be more than enough for this site. If your site is more complex, you might need to look into deploy adapters for Netlify, but it’s a well-supported ecosystem.
- Going from next.js to Astro for a static site was similarly easy, though more time-consuming. I’m using Tailwind here, so the styles were basically plug and play. Astro also is just better for a Markdown-driven blog. Instead of some nasty logic to read files from disk during the build in next.js, I just use Astro’s content collections. Zod validators for my Markdown frontmatter? Yes please.
- As it turns out, this site doesn’t need any client-side JS at all, so I also got to significantly increase performance today.
- The hardest part was moving from Github to Tangled, but that is only because Netlify doesn’t support Tangled out of the box. (This makes sense, Tangled is in alpha!) However, you can connect your Tangled repo to a Netlify project if you set up the project manually via the Netlify CLI. Then, you can create a build hook for your project and write a Tangled pipeline (analogous to a Github action) to hit that webhook on pushes to main. Here’s mine. It’s just a line of
curl. As far as the git hosting, Tangled has been flawless so far.
As web engineers, we have to be able to stand behind our tools and our choices. Thankfully, with a little bit of work, I can stand behind this website again.