Why I rebuilt this site in Astro
React SPAs are invisible to search engines. I wanted a site where the content actually exists when you curl it.
The old lechkaniuk.com was a React SPA. Looked fine in Chrome. Invisible to Google, invisible to LLM crawlers, invisible to anyone who didn’t have JavaScript running.
I’ve been building software for twenty years. I should have known better.
The rebuild is in Astro. Server-rendered by default, interactive where it needs to be. The content collection system is clean — essays and book chapters live in markdown files, get schema-validated at build time, and generate static pages. No database queries on page load.
The thing I didn’t expect: building this is making me better at articulating what I actually believe about each topic. You can’t write an essay unless you have something to say. Turns out I have more to say than I thought.