Hello World

Hi everyone, welcome to the new version of zorreth.com

The website has finally turned from the simple link shortener to a good-looking blog. It only has the necessary pages and features, and so far I think it’s perfect for my needs. I only added a bit of a bio on the homepage at the moment, I probably have to add some more so I could really use the site as a portfolio.

The Blog Stack

I wanted to try something new, so I tried Astro. I think it’s one of the best choices for the static content-driven websites, which is exactly what I wanted my website to be. Astro outputs the simple HTML/JS/CSS multi-page bundle, which I host on GitHub Pages.

The blog is driven by Astro content collections:

• Astro content collections is this simple way to collect the (.md) files in a specified directory, parse them and access through the simple getCollection() function.
• Astro allows you to automatically generate HTML markup based on the .MD files. Moreover, you can add the necessary information inside a particular Markdown file, such as (post) title, description, publication date, author name, and any other needed data, which gets validated and parsed using Zod and can be retrieved by Astro’s getCollection() function.

I also added @astrojs/sitemap for automatic sitemap generation. Everything is being generated on build, so the client always retrieves the fully generated page, asset or sitemap.

The <n> minutes read counter at the top of each post is being calculated on build using this simple function:

function calculateReadTime(text: string): number {
  return Math.ceil(text.replace(/\n+/g, ' ').split(' ').length / 200);
}

which takes the blog text, splits it into words, and divides the n of words by 200 (average WPM) to get the approximate reading time. Simple, but it works.

Comments Section

I didn’t want to use the comment services or build my own and self-host it for something as simple as blog comments, so I decided to use utterances for now. It uses the GitHub repository issues to store comments, allowing users to post comments after logging in with their GitHub account. The thing works pretty good as I tested it, so I’ll keep it for now and maybe move to something else later.

Further Updates

I’d like to write web-development related posts, not sure yet how often. Stay tuned for updates, or subscribe to the new RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!