mibrammall.dev

Astro: A migration interrupted

I recently tried migrating this blog from Next.js to Astro. While it was mostly smooth, there were a few issues which caused me to pause the migration. A quick summary of the obstructions to the migration I experienced are:

  • The content here is served from markdown files. Exporting these into Astro was easy and worked out of the box, except any special character was not escaped correctly. This may have been trivial to fix, but my motivation to fix it was low.

  • I'm hoping to put up more mathematical content here at some point, and I've spent some time getting LaTeX\LaTeX to work. I was able to use the same tools in astro, but in the end it would only render simple expressions correctly.

  • Astro required me to update my URL structure. Having search params in URLs doesn't translate easily to astro for static content.

Otherwise it seemed like a good framework for hosting content-heavy websites. It made a lot of sense to attempt the transition since most of this website is and will be static, but I just spent more time than I was willing to spend on trying to overcome the obstacles outlined here. Maybe I'll try again soon.