blog migration, again, jekyll to astro (and a little ai)

so i moved the blog again. the last time i wrote one of these was back in 2022, when i came back to royashbrook.com and switched to a brutalist-ish jekyll theme. that served me fine for a few years, but it started to feel old, and honestly not like something i’d build today.

why

a few things piled up:

the site had no working metrics. i had google analytics on, but it was the old universal analytics tag, which google shut off in 2023. i was not really worried about this, but didn’t notice, so something nice to fix.
all my newer projects live on cloudflare now, and i wanted the blog on the same stack instead of github pages. automatically gave me metrics, plus consistency with other personal stuff.
jekyll’s been good to me, but i have been in svelte/js land for many years. astro is more in line with this, so again, just more consistent on personal stuff.
i wanted to redesign the layout of the site anyway. i wanted to add a landing page, not just drop only into the blog. most of the content was blog data, but i thought it would be nice to have some links to some other projects instead of just to my blog or having to hope people went to github to find those.
it was time for a change. sometimes, you just want to change things a little. =)

what

short version: jekyll to astro, github pages to cloudflare, and a fresh minimal look.

astro for the site. it’s built for markdown content, so all old posts came over as-is, and i kept every url exactly (/year/month/day/title/) so nothing anyone ever linked to breaks. i wrote a little porter script to convert the old jekyll posts, including the ~90 old github gist embeds so they still render.
cloudflare for hosting, with cloudflare web analytics for metrics. cookieless, free, no banner, and it’s the same thing i run my latest personal sites on. so i can finally tell if anyone’s out there. =)
the look: monospace, lowercase, pretty sparse. terminal-ish, but with enough structure that you can actually find the projects and the writing. i went back and forth on a few directions and settled here. it’s not so far off my old site, but has dark/light mode.
all the source in it’s own repo named royashbrook.com, which is what i used to use. since moving to github pages it has been in the mandated one. also, i could make it private if i wanted since it builds and sends out to cloudflare.

the ai part

another big reason was ai is out now. makes porting something like this trivial. easy to a/b test, fiddle, and avoid much typing/grunt work for me. like porting 247 posts and wiring up the build. that’s increasingly how i work now. so more posts coming on that for sure. like everyone else in the world, i have my own little custom “agentic os”, basically a setup for how i actually use ai day to day. i’ll probably write about it soon. this site, and the new for ai agents section with a couple skills and mcps i’ve made, is sort of the tip of that iceberg.

anyway. same blog, same rambling, just a newer house. thanks for reading, whoever you are. i can see you now. =P