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2 minutes
January 2025 - the website review
2025-01-06

You may be noticing that everything looks different around here. I’ve been hard at work redoing every single one of my websites from the ground up with Astro in an effort to cut costs and make my online life generally easier to manage.

I’ll go through each of these in a little bit of detail.

Portfolio#

College applications are coming up soon, and I knew that some colleges would use your personal website as a portfolio for your work. That’s why I went to work on trying to make it the best it could be. Of course, it was the second time I’d ever used Astro (the first was an experimental side project that’s still in deployment), so the results weren’t that great.

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I used Astro’s official portfolio template and tailored it to my needs. Unfortunately, trying to get blog posts and projects to work was hell. So I eventually settled on creating a new website for my blog - it’s easier for me to separate stuff this way, and that’s what I want. A few levels of separation.

Blog#

Eventually, I’d need to get the blog done. Luckily, I’d had experience in this - but unfortunately, I accidentally broke my entire previous blog. I didn’t even know what happened - just an upgrade and poof! (In retrospect, it was probably TinaCMS and its multitude of security vulnerabilities, but I didn’t know that at the time.)

Anyways, posts were already written, so I copied and pasted them in. Then, I realized how much more I could do with a website like this, so I deleted them and started fresh. You’re looking at a brand-spanking new website. And it’s beautifully built.

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I’ll get licensing out of the way later - right now, I just need to get everything online first.

Music Blog#

So it turns out that I have a lot more music than I thought. And I thought it would be great to keep a little website full of my entire discography, plus a little bit of extras from development for those who really want to read into it.

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It’s also built with Fuwari, and I love it.

But what about the regular music website?#

I’ve put that off for now and just sent it to my blog for now. I really want to make something with the energy of Madilyn Mei’s website with some of the design cues from Taylor Swift’s website. This’ll be a challenge - but I’m always up for one.

Closing Notes#

Seriously, once you start, you can’t stop. It’s so easy to deploy a website like this that I’m constantly finding reasons to create stuff.