Rebuilding my website with Astro

This site used to run on Hugo with a third-party theme. It worked, but every customization meant editing Go templates inside a vendored theme — and I never quite owned the result. So I rebuilt it from scratch.

Why Astro

For a personal site that is 95% content, the requirements are simple:

• Static HTML output, no client-side framework runtime
• Markdown/MDX as the writing format
• First-class internationalization, since I write in English and Portuguese
• Syntax highlighting that doesn’t ship JavaScript to the browser

Astro checks every box. Content lives in typed collections, so a missing description or a malformed date fails the build instead of silently shipping broken metadata:

const blog = defineCollection({
  loader: glob({ pattern: '**/*.{md,mdx}', base: './src/content/blog' }),
  schema: z.object({
    title: z.string(),
    description: z.string(),
    pubDate: z.coerce.date(),
    tags: z.array(z.string()).default([]),
    draft: z.boolean().default(false),
  }),
});

The bilingual workflow

Each article is a pair of files that share a name:

src/content/blog/
├── en/rebuilding-my-website.mdx
└── pt/rebuilding-my-website.mdx

The shared file name is the URL slug, and it is also how the site pairs translations: if the counterpart exists, the post automatically links to it and emits the right hreflang tags for search engines. If it doesn’t, nothing breaks — articles can exist in one language only.

Publishing a post is exactly this:

git add src/content/blog/en/my-new-post.mdx
git commit -m "post: my new post"
git push

Netlify builds and deploys. No CMS, no database, no admin panel — just files in a repository, the way it should be.