Blog Updates

Hey all! It's been a bit. I never quite capped off the Iceland blog series, but I did take notes on all of the missing days and hope to revisit those soon and write up the remainder of our time there.

I'm mainly writing today to inform people that the website's blog has been completely restructured. It doesn't look any different to you, and that's intentional. The rendering wasn't supposed to change, but how the content is structured and retrieved is totally different.

Markdown Blogging?

Since the site runs on Astro, I had started a rudimentary blogging functionality since it was fairly easy to integrate with an existing Astro site without needing any external packages. This has worked fine for about the last year, but my ambitions have grown and I wanted to do more with the site.

Sanity CMS

While I was writing in Iceland, I realized it wasn't going to be easy to integrate images into the blog posts I was writing, so I began thinking on how I should expand the site's blogging capability to accommodate that. I've also recently renewed my interest in photography and wanted to expand my website to also serve as a gallery for my photo work. I tried to do this all in Astro but that was quite difficult. I never quite figured it out, and eventually realized such a need was better suited for a CMS anyway. So I've adopted Sanity as my CMS of choice going forward. They have an official integration with Astro, and it's worked like a dream. I was able to spin up the CMS and rebuild the blog to retrieve data from it in just an afternoon. I've been really impressed by how flexible Sanity is and how quickly I was able to do what I needed. Honestly, I feel foolish for putting it off for so long. I should have just done this from the start.

What's Next?

So what's next for the old website? I'm still working on how to nail down a photo gallery with Sanity, and will be working on that in the coming weeks. I'll post again once that's done, but thanks for reading for now!