A new blog, built to actually be used

The old blog was a single hand-edited AsciiDoc file rendered once and never touched again. Every new thought meant wrestling with the whole document. That’s a good way to make sure you never write a second post.

This one is different: every post is its own Markdown (or MDX, if I need a live component) file in src/content/blog. Push to master, GitHub Actions builds the site, and it’s live.

A few things worth calling out:

Code blocks that don’t look like it’s 2004

record Point(int x, int y) {
    double distanceTo(Point other) {
        return Math.hypot(x - other.x, y - other.y);
    }
}

Syntax highlighting comes from Shiki, the same highlighter VS Code uses, wired up through Astro’s Markdown pipeline — no client-side JS required just to color a record.

Comments, without a comments database

Discussion on each post is powered by giscus, which maps a page to a GitHub Discussion thread. No accounts to manage, no spam queue to moderate beyond what GitHub already gives you — just sign in with GitHub and reply.

That’s it for the meta post. Back to actual content next.