Astro, Man!
Consolidating My Website World
So I have a lot of domains. Several hobby sites. A couple of business sites. A blog. Domains spread across registrars. Hosting on Vercel. Others on Hostinger. Most were not updated regularly. The blog was on WordPress and I was tired of the updates. Drupal is my daily driver for professional projects so I like to branch out and play with other CMS platforms when I have the chance. Would love to use Drupal CMS more but hosting can be a pain and it is overkill for all of these sites.
What do I do? Leave it be. Wrestle with trying to remember what goes where? Finding passwords, tracking subscriptions, trying to remember where I was the last time I touched the code. It made my brain hurt. I needed to consolidate. To bring peace and harmony to my digital playground.
I started by starting the process of bringing all the domains under a single registrar as they came up for renewal. I went with Cloudflare. Affordable. Easy to use. Lots of options for growth. The occassinal outage for excitement. So many of my clients use the it felt like a good way for me to share in their world and learn some new tricks. Decision made. As each domain renews it moves there. Life is a little easier.
Hosting? I liked using Vercel for my React projects. Solid platform and had no issues. I will use it again. I had the Wordpress on Hostinger. I am cheap and they have been providing reliable service at a good price. So I decided to used up the three slots I had there. For everything else I chose Cloudflare Pages. Free. Easy to use. I don’t get a lot of traffic on these sites. If one blows up and gets a following I figured it they would have the options to meet my needs.
Code. No more Wordpress or custom React SPAs. Kind of. I had been playing with Astro and it does everything I need to do for the sites I work on. Easy to spin up. Fast. Secure. I write everything in markdown in Obsidian anyway so no big leap for blog content. Let the migration began.
Migrating Wordpress to Astro took a while. I used Claude Design for a new simple look. Easy. Claude Code did the migration. Took longer than I thought but did a good job. Been messing with Cursor again as they gave me a $10 credit when I tried to cancel. Had it clean up the front end. Solid work. In fact it was so good I had it migrate three React SPAs and a static React blog I was messing with to Astro. Knocked those out of the park. Was really happy with how it handled the work. It’s actually churning through another site I remembered only this morning as I write. Will probably be done by the time I finish writing. It cranked out one this morning as I walking around a beautiful lake in Sligo.
Bish. Bosh. Bang. Sorted. Have a lovely digital day.