If you can see this, you’re looking at the new v4 Automatica website.
This website has been built using a framework called Astro which is a Static Site Generator. What you’re looking at in your browser is delivered entirely via static html and css files – there’s no active content running on the backend, no XMLRPC endpoint, no SQL database. Just pure files.
The original v1 Automatica website was a bunch of static files, I can’t remember what tool I used to create it back in 2009, but that website suck around for a short time before it was superseded with v2 which was the first website done in WordPress. The first WordPress site was a custom theme that I build myself – it wasn’t fancy, but it got the job done.
Through having WordPress in place, I was able to start the blog off, and now there’s blog posts stretching back for well over a decade.
Some time later, the website needed a visual overhaul, and I contracted out the design to a client of mine who built the WordPress theme that you will have seen when visiting this site up until recently.
This version probably persisted the longest of all, as it generally worked well, used a minimal number of plugins and was fairly easy to keep updated.
Recently however in a quest to improve the performance and accessibility of the site, I’ve turned to more modern tools, and built a completely new site with Astro, hosted on Cloudflare Pages.
What’s old is new again – the new site is back to being static html and css, the main difference however is that Astro lets me keep the page content in easily accessible markdown files, and every time there’s an update, the site is rebuilt and pushed up to the web host.
Anyway, there are likely to be a few rough edges as I get the final tweaks applied, however as it stands today I thought it had hit the threshold to be launched, so here it is.
I hope you enjoy it, please let me know your thoughts…
Kai