The tech behind this site

Here’s a short tour of how this site is put together.

Built with Astro

The site is a static Astro project. Every page gets rendered to plain HTML at build time, so there’s no server to keep running. It loads fast, and hosting costs next to nothing.

Posts are just files

Each post is a Markdown file. To write a new one, I add a file, give it a title and a date, and the list pages and links sort themselves out. It doesn’t need a database, and there’s no admin panel to log into.

Bilingual by default

Everything here is written in both English and Japanese. English lives at the root, Japanese under /ja, and your browser’s language decides which you land on first. You can switch from the header any time; it remembers what you picked.

Dark mode

The toggle in the header switches between a light theme and a dark one. Left alone, it follows your system setting, and it applies before the page paints. 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.

I’ll keep tweaking this over time. There’s a similar post about the stock screener I run on a Raspberry Pi 2, if you want more of this kind of thing.