Everything old is new again

Sun, 10 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I've spent many years ignoring the advances made in the JavaScript world, but in early 2024 I figured it was about time to bring myself up to date. I always find it easier to learn a new language or system if I have an actual project I want to do with it, so of course I ported this blog off my creaky old Python blogging client (a static site generator in modern parlance), bzero, and made it into an Astro site instead.

It took me another year and a half to actually finish it off to the point that I was happy putting it online, but here we are!

It's lovely to see what people have come up with in the content world. Static site generators have had years to mature, and using JavaScript to render pages makes a ton of sense. Back when I used to work closer to the front end, I remember there being pretty much no language overlap between backend and frontend folks, so when you had a site written in PHP with frontend JS for interactivity, it was a pain for the frontend devs to make their changes to the PHP code that rendered HTML. Doing it in JS must remove a lot of friction there.

As a user, I'm not sure if I'm a fan of the whole SPA thing -- I like my fast-loading sites! -- but I bet that works even better organizationally; backend devs can focus on providing a sensible API, and frontend devs can control the entire routing/rendering/interactivity side of things.

Phillip Pearson - web + electronics notes

Everything old is new again