The New Umby Dot Dog

Well I’ve been talking about it for the best part of over a year now, and finally, it’s here and ready and out of “beta”!

The new Umby Dot Dog!!!!

So this is my personal site for just fucking about on the internet. Because fucking about on the internet is fun :3 For those who have been paying attention, my old site was another statically generated website that was made using Eleventy. I still very very very much love it as a framework, but the stuff that I wanna do with my site doesn’t make it suitable to my needs. It might still very much work fantastic for your needs, and if you are interested in writing your own SSG website, feel free to give it a look! Thanks for your service Eleventy, o7 for you.

This new site is built on top of another site generation framework that I’ve been slowly learning of the past few months, name of Astro! It comes with a bunch of cool and crazy stuff like support for server-side building of specific pages, web components (even from other UI frameworks like React wowie!) and customizable content collections, oh my!!!

The coolest bit about being primarily server-side generated now is I can have stuff that just updates instantaneously without me needing to rebuild and redeploy the site every five minutes. It Just Works! You probably noticed the weather thing on the front page. That gets updated every time you visit the page (Except it’s cached so it doesn’t hammer the service I’m using for querying that stuff lmao)! So does the emojo in the footer, and the hero and indicator that pops up on the frontpage when I’m live on Twitch! That’s cool as heck and I like it a lot :3

The one cool thing I’ve been fricking with for a bit has been MDX support, which meshes Markdown together with TSX in some type of unholy Rosemary’s Baby situation.

See this?

That’s a React component. But it’s included as part of the Markdown text. What the heck?????? That’s sick!

Okay nice so what now?

Now? Heheheh… 😈

I actually try to use this shit for its intended purpose: Writing stuff that I regurgitate direct from my brain to my keyboard, for your entertainment and yours and mine suffering! I’ll eventually be adding more sections to the site, such as a mini-CV? A contact page? A gallergy of fun and cute arts I’ve accrued over the years??? Probably an Ask Me Questions section??? Expanding out the landing page to put more stuff on it! Maybe even Bluesky-powered comments???? Who knows!

Oh yeah and I’m trying to get an RSS feed added and it’s being annoying about autodiscovery and I don’t know why!!! Oh well, I’m sure I’ll work it out :3 Until then, stay wuffy or whatever!!!! awawawawawaaaaa