This is my first blog post on my new website that I’ve built using Astro 2.0. I am still figuring out how I feel about it.
My first impressions are very good. For a static site generator I am pretty excited about it. The fact that it can render and use so many other libraries’ components is pretty amazing. I am most familiar with React and would probably use those the most but on a technical level it’s impressive that it supports those other libraries with essentially the same UX.
I build a lot of dynamic web applications with React and it’s clear that Astro is not intended for that type of thing: it is more of a website builder and not a webapp builder. Because of that it seems immediately limiting because I could use the same tools that I use for things like, such as Next.js, that for static sites as well.
However, Astro’s speed and simplicity despite being so sophisticated is pretty compelling. I also am really impressed by the Content Collections functionality in Astro 2.0. This makes it really easy to use a files-based approach for storing content but also makes it easy to keep the frontmatter and such consistent across them. I have quite a few ideas of how to use this effectively.