Blog refresh

The blog stayed pretty much the same since ~2016. It was done with the help of Jekyll, with Leonidas theme all the way up to today. It is time to move forward: I struggled several years with Jekyll dependencies and looked at alternatives but none of them allowed to move the content and overall look without impacting external references to the blog.

This year AI systems are at a point where even locally hosted ones are up to any rewrite challenge. Blog rewrite is a minimal task, it seems, so after playing with Astro in the past with few other sites, I decided to move my blog to it as well – with the help of Claude – but I wanted something more interesting than moving from A to B.

Few weeks ago I used my locally hosted Qwen3.8-27B to write me a set of tools: a Billiard rooms game and a local Markdown notes editor. The latter is a nice in-place Markdown editor: it visualizes Markdown in place and a click on the paragraph switches to an edit mode of that single paragraph.

While Qwen3.8-27B deployment was busy fixing some cluster management issue for Ahdapa OAuth2 IdP, I asked Claude to perform the migration of the blog to the Astro codebase. It completed this task within an hour and I asked to extend the website’s development mode (npx astro dev) with mdnotes’ in-place Markdown editor. New blog posts can be created right in the development mode; npx astro build will create static HTML pages taht can be published.

It required several iterations, as usual, but we’ve got there. Individual paragraphs can be edited, images inserted from clipboard or uploaded, already published posts can be referenced, all in the same development workflow.

Below is a sample screenshot:

Claude also helped with the blog redesign. We went through ~10 different iterations to settle down with this Nordic contour maps view. Contour maps unique per each essay, Astro generates an SVG with the map during the site build time and then reuses renders for the social cards as well. The color scheme changes slightly according to a season, so winter will get a bit colder tones and now we have a Ruska season.

Astro collates tags and themes of posts. Themes turn threads of articles into a trail and the trails then highlited at the home page. A small but nice hint towards the nature we have here up north – similar to the trail that runs through each essay’s page from top to bottom.

Below is a small video that shows how it all looks in action: