I wanted to share what I’ve been up to lately regarding a few projects. Usually I don’t code that often in my spare time; however, I had some fun ideas, and Astro rekindled my love for the web. Also, I’m terrible at blogging and showing stuff I create, so this is a win-win situation.

First up is my new website, which you are currently looking at to read this wonderful blog post. I just wanted to migrate my old Gatsby site to Astro, yet I ended up completely revamping it! And I think I’ve never been happier with my personal site. It might not be the most original idea, but I totally dig it. Page size also went down to 133 kB from almost 500 kB.

After that, I started working on my next project powered by Astro, which is nharox.games. I love video games, and I like to keep track of stuff. I previously used services like Backloggery (and later Backloggd) for tracking, but I didn’t care for most of the platforms’ features and didn’t want to rely on a service anymore. So why not build my own instead?

All data now lives in JSON files, and I’m only using the API of IGDB to fetch the cover for each game. Maybe one day I’ll fetch more data, like genres, and create some fun stats with fancy charts.

Next up is a smaller project for my favourite music. I can’t keep track of it, and a plain list is boring, so I built a site! It’s powered by Astro (again) and the Spotify web API. The data for the albums and the songs are each fetched from a playlist before the build process, so everything’s static and the images are automatically optimized. It’s also possible to open an album (or song) in the Spotify app directly. Or have one picked at random with the press of a button.

While working on the previous two projects, I had another idea for a simple blog to just share images. So that’s why I created nharox.photos. I sometimes miss Instagram, and this is a nice way to share a photo every now and then. Plus, I can avoid social media at the same time. I think by now you can guess what I used to build this. I also took the opportunity to try out Tina, a headless CMS that works on my mobile phone.

At first, I wanted to use Contentful or Prismic as CMS, but unfortunately, these services are not responsive at all and don’t offer a native app either. Oh well. At least all of my content now lives in the repository, and I don’t have to worry about a service shutting down or changing their pricing.

Now that all of these projects are out of the way and I’m happy with their current state, I can finally continue working on version 2 of Blathers. I already made some good progress last year with the move from Preact to Next.js and TypeScript. I’m also tweaking the design, adding a few animations, and improving the overall experience.

Last but not least is Everyday Wishes. I honestly can’t wait to get back to it! I’m currently in the process of dusting off the project to get it up to speed. One thing I did earlier this year, though, was to move Keystone into my Next.js application so I don’t have to deploy the backend separately anymore.

And that’s a wrap. This ended up being way longer than I anticipated. I hope you enjoyed reading this, and maybe you even got inspired to build something fun yourself.