hii my friend, welcome to my new website, powered by Astro!

before

As you may or may not know, I had a personal website with some technical notes about six years ago based on Hexo. I will say it is definitely a good and powerful framework and I did write a theme for it to customize my website (my first GitHub project that hits 50+ stars!). That’s how I started on frontend development stuff.

That’s on an entirely different domain. The site is still live, fyi.

But Hexo is pretty limited, it basically just renders a bunch of Markdown files into static HTMLs. If you want to do just a little bit more cool stuff, you want to switch to a different thing.

My second personal website is built with Nuxt. Again, wonderful framework. It uses Vue instead of pure HTML and I found it very intuitive at that time compared to React. It is a full-stack framework, it has Server side render (SSR), it has so many things. I chose to store my Markdown files in a GitHub repository (very similar to what I did in my first Hexo site) and use an API endpoint to return the content to the user side. Now the website has some dynamic functionalities but mainly still static (because I put a very “radical” cache to make the site fast).

I soon found another good way to store my articles, which is GitHub Discussions. It has Markdown built in, supports picture uploading, and has a comment discussion thread. Perfect! So I made a Nuxt theme named Biscus (sounds like Biscoff for me now for no reason). Basically, it just fetches GitHub GraphQL API to get the content and returns it to users. To optimize the speed, I used Nuxt to write a small “middleware” to cache the content.

It seemed like I finally had a perfect, customized place to write my blog — then I had no time and nothing to write about.

junx.me

I need a place to present my stuff. Maybe my photos, my projects, or just sharing some random stuff with my friends! So I registered junx.me in 2024 and it has become my personal page since then. At first, I drew very large inspiration from moma.org (I was so obsessed with Sans-Serif font at that time, probably now too).

The robotics team website I built, 7447.team, is somewhat similar to moma.org (if you can tell after so many updates).

But that page looks dumb. So I decided to change it after I randomly found rsms.me and thought that looks cool. The layout is clean while I love the font Inter.

My current personal page, junx.me, is somewhat similar to rsms.me (if you can tell after so many updates).

Underneath, the framework was changed to Next.js and I finally started to write React. I mean, if you get used to its grammar, it is more straightforward than Vue. It (probably) also has better performance. Because of Next.js’s great image optimization, I also started to deploy my photography works on my personal website. Rather than radical cache rules, I used lazy load, placeholder blurry images, etc. to make the website fast (I learned). But it i also harder for me to update now since I have to run my custom Python script to generate placeholders and edit JSON files to display photos on the site.

All of these have zero ChatGPT or other AI involved. I proudly said.

runs on Astro now

I decided to switch to Astro not only because of the frequent and serious security vulnerabilities in Next.js and Vercel’s practice of using the open-source community to bind users to its platform, but also because maintenance became increasingly difficult as I continued to add more stuff to the website.

Maybe, for a personal page, SSR or any other things are not necessary. Static is the way to go?

I designed this new website design on Figma yesterday (yes, I love Figma). And thanks to Codex, I am able to turn the design into code and ship it in hours. GPT-5.5 Extra High is indeed very powerful but the initial result looks awful. I did have to change a lot of style to make it look like the way I drew it on Figma. Other than that, I found Astro is faster even without any optimization.

The website is now live at yu.junx.me, hosted on Cloudflare. Hope you enjoy it.