New year, new site!

Whoops, hi again! It’s been a bit longer than I meant it to be since my last update to this site or blog post, and I’m here to fix that.

New site

The new site is built with Astro, and… that’s pretty much it actually! I enjoy keeping my site pretty minimal, and the extra flexibility writing my own CSS gives me.
Why astro?

• It works well as a static site generator (I don’t need to worry much about hosting for now when it’s just a bunch of static files when built)
• It allows me to finally try something with more JSX-like syntax (not sure how I managed to avoid it for this long)
• It’s flexible enough that I feel like I can do exactly I want with it, without me having to write everything from scratch
• It’s powerful enough that I know I’ll be able to extend it in future if I feel like making something more dynamic
• Takes care of making sure most images are optimised well enough

It also comes with some other nice features like syntax highlighting:

var text = File.ReadAllLines("input.txt");

// Advent of Code 2023 Day 6
// https://adventofcode.com/2023/day/6
// Part 1
var totalTimes = ReadAsSeparateNumbersFromLine(text[0]);
var distancesToBeat = ReadAsSeparateNumbersFromLine(text[1]);

var marginOfError = 1;
for (var race = 0; race < totalTimes.Length; race++)
{
    marginOfError *= MarginOfError((int)totalTimes[race], distancesToBeat[race]);
}
Console.WriteLine($"Part 1: {marginOfError}");

return;

long[] ReadAsSeparateNumbersFromLine(string line)
{
    return line
        .Split(' ', StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries)
        [1..]
        .Select(long.Parse)
        .ToArray();
}

int MarginOfError(int timeAvailable, long distanceToBeat)
{
    return Enumerable
        .Range(0, timeAvailable)
        .Select(guess => CalcDistanceTravelled(guess, timeAvailable))
        .Count(distance => distance >= distanceToBeat);
}

A lot of this is also standard in other static site generators, but compared to my own previous custom solution, it’s a whole lot of features!

I also took this as an opportunity to redo quite a bit of the CSS (e.g. /blog now looks significantly nicer), but I kept the bits of design I still like. (I actually think the old design still looks good! But for some parts I felt like doing something new)

I’ve also got a couple of blog posts planned out, so hopefully I’ll get around to writing those! They’ll be a mixture of stuff, nothing as technical or in-depth as my CSC1028 posts though (yet) - more like my FTL one, either in theme or rambliness.

Finally, I’ll be keeping a log of changes to the site at /changelog - I like looking back on how stuff like a personal site can change over time!