The first commit of this version of the website happened in February 2017 (169e91e7). It went from a set of handcrafted HTML and CSS files (edit: I was wrong, it was a Wordpress site!) to a site statically generated with Jekyll.
Jekyll gave me the vocabulary and the confidence to do bigger things. The loose collection of pages turned into a coherent set of essays and portfolio entries. Then, a reading list and reviews I would write of them (that ended up being a tough thing to keep up on). Later, a microblog.
In the last few years, I’ve noticed creakiness in the Jekyll ecosystem. Once, I upgraded the Ruby version and the build broke. Plugins stopped getting maintained (I’m looking at you, jekyll-paginate-v2). Liquid 4.x is limited in what it can express (5.x looks like it’ll never get supported). Lastly, I’m not a Ruby person and I don’t want to maintain custom extensions.
Recently, I’ve used Astro for a few content-heavy static sites and I liked what I saw. Well, first and foremost, I’m a TypeScript person. My requirements for this site remain the same: static-site generation primary, JavaScript as an enhancement layer, and building on top of a variety of content types. Back then, I flirted with the idea of porting the site to Astro, but the idea of undoing years of technical debt felt daunting so I never took the next step.
Yesterday, I bit the bullet and ran the migration using Claude Code. It was done in a few hours with Fable 5.1 driving Opus 5.5 subagents and the entire process went as smoothly as one can hope. Layouts went from Liquid to Astro components. The content folders became more sane; it’s interesting how many Jekyll conventions can quickly become limitations once the use cases outgrow what they were designed for. I took the opportunity to convert SCSS to plain old CSS — CSS is mostly at parity these days with a few features in the pipe. The codebase reads better, runs better (no more fumbling with bundler, why no run scripts?), and the generated output is basically byte-identical.
Then, I shipped my first site change in years, a revamped projects list. Which is to say, fifthrevision is now officially on Astro. So far so good! I’m sure I’ve traded one set of constraints for another. Time will tell.
For nearly a decade, you served me well. Thank you, Jekyll.