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So far, everything’s been great with Astro. Great break from React. In fact, I’ve realized that only 20% of web dev I’ve done in my life ACTUALLY needs React. That being said, React’s component model was what kept me in, and Astro is similar.

I want to start a mini restaurant blog on my site. I eat out a lotta nice places but when someone asks me for recommendations, I can’t remember any.

I’ll make it simple: make a micropost each time I got to a memorable restaurant. Purposely keep it unstructured so I don’t get lazy and stop updating it.

I was trying to make a micropost for Hyperlocal, and my own CMS blocked me from doing so because the image was too big! I don’t remember asking my agent to do this, so I was impressed, but annoyed too. One prompt later, and I added client-side image compression. I might spin this into its own tool.

My CMS is pretty good! It’s nice that I can make “one-off” edits for things that are useful to me. For example, in my micro blog, I have threads. Managing threads was annoying on mobile, so I added a thread viewer on the side.

If the microblog post is a part of a thread, it shows you all the posts and makes it easy to continue that thread!

I got a simple media editor for my CMS working!

You can upload images, then click them to copy the markdown image syntax like ![](/images/media-editor-demo.png).

On iOS Safari, I cannot have my login details remembered, so I’ll have to enter my password every time. I can’t seem to get Safari’s password manager to work with this either, so I might have to think of another simple way to have “just for me” auth.

Basic auth works great! Only thing, I wonder if I can save my auth state and not have to enter my username and password every time. I remember iOS Safari having issues with this.

Having a text-only CMS is easy, but I really need the ability to upload and manage images. My current image storage is pretty well-defined: this microblog post is in /content/microblog/2026/{slug}.md, and its images will be at /public/images/microblog/2026/{slug}/. Let’s see what Claude can do!

Turns out, it was not difficult to make a CMS for my blog. I got a super simple file editor. Now the next step is to make sure that only I can access the CMS. I was thinking of using Better Auth with a D1 database, but basic auth might work better since there’s only one user (me).

Editing my own website has always been a pain. I’d have to open my laptop, open my editor, remember how I structured my blog, write markdown, preview it locally, push, wait for it to build, etc.

I think it’s time to vibecode my own CMS. It’s probably gonna become a maintenance nightmare, but let’s see.

I’m switching my personal site from Nextjs to Astro. I’m taking a break from React, ShadCN, and Nextjs.