astro VS SvelteKit

The short version — WordPress is a brilliant tool — it's also the wrong tool for a site that's nothing but articles, calculators, and a sitemap. Tinkernotes has no logins, no comments, no checkout, and no database it can't live without. So it's an Astro site built as static HTML and served from Cloudflare Pages. The result is a site that costs £0/month to host, ships almost no JavaScript, and can't be hacked the ways WordPress sites get hacked. If you're a WP dev sitting on a content project, this is the build I'd push you towards.

Astro for the shell

Astro supports all the features we need to make our content performant and easily accessible.

⭐ withastro/astro — 59,040 stars, 3,420 forks

I have been meaning to upgrade my personal site to Astro 6 for a while. The release notes sat in my open tabs for weeks, and every time I sat down to do it, I found an excuse to work on something else. This week, I finally ran out of excuses. I carved out an afternoon, ran npx @astrojs/upgrade, crossed my fingers, and expected a smooth ride.

Astro already supports dynamic endpoints that return binary responses. The Astro ecosystem also ships @resvg/resvg-js, a native rasteriser for SVG-to-PNG. Between those two things, every piece we need is already in the toolbox.

Migrating a blog off WordPress or Ghost. If you are moving to a static site generator like Astro, Hugo, or Jekyll, every post needs to be a .md file. Export your WordPress XML, feed each block through the converter, drop the result into content/posts/. I moved 84 posts this way in an evening.

I built the calculator with Astro (zero JavaScript, static HTML) and deployed on Cloudflare Pages for free. Each state page lets you adjust system size, cost, and electricity rate to see personalized estimates.

EmDash takes a different approach: it's built entirely in TypeScript on top of Astro, meaning you get static-site performance with dynamic CMS capabilities. If you've been eyeing the Astro ecosystem and wishing it had a proper CMS story, this is worth your attention.

⭐ sveltejs/kit — 18,742 stars, 1,893 forks

Static sites are fast and cheap to host, but your data goes stale the moment you deploy. This post shows how a SvelteKit portfolio site serves live data from five external sources while still deploying as static HTML to GitHub Pages.

Issue Tracker

This reminds me of the recent SvelteKit Remote Functions GH discussion:

> Even in systems that prevent server functions from being declared in client code (such as "use server" in React Server Components), experienced developers can be caught out. We prefer a design that emphasises the public nature of remote functions rather than the fact that they run on the server, and avoids any confusion around lexical scope. [0]

[0] https://github.com/sveltejs/kit/discussions/13897

SvelteKit

You can share classes in Svelte, but safely sharing them in SvelteKit, requires a bit more code...

Image processing #241

Per-User Limits: Track requests on a per-user basis using their IPv4 address. We’ll leverage SvelteKit to easily retrieve the client IP with its built-in method.