The tech behind this site

As promised, here’s a short tour of how this site is put together.

Built with Astro

The site is a static Astro project. Every page is pre-rendered to plain HTML at build time, so there’s no server to run and nothing to spin up — it’s fast to load and cheap to host anywhere.

Posts are just files

Each post is a Markdown file. Writing a new one means adding a file and filling in a title and a date; the list pages and links take care of themselves. No database, no admin panel.

Bilingual by default

The site is written in both English and Japanese. English lives at the root and Japanese under /ja, and your browser’s language decides which one you see first. You can switch any time from the header, and the choice is remembered.

Dark mode

There’s a light and a dark theme. It follows your system preference to begin with, and the toggle in the header lets you override it. The choice is applied before the page paints, so there’s no flash of the wrong colors on load.

The crawler in the background

If you watch the background for a moment, you’ll notice a faint line slowly branching and spreading across the screen. That’s a small canvas animation I call the “crawler”: it starts from a few points and, frame by frame, each line sprouts new lines at slight angles, growing outward like roots until it reaches the edges and settles. It’s drawn in a soft translucent color so it stays in the background and never gets in the way of reading.

That’s the gist of it. I’ll keep tweaking things over time.