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astro

Everything about building with Astro: content collections, islands architecture, SSG, and the surrounding ecosystem.

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16 posts filed under astro. This page keeps you inside the same topic while you move through older entries in the archive.

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16 posts total in this topic archive.

Four paper card tags on a dark background — Photo by Angèle Kamp on Unsplash

21 Apr 2026, BST · 27 min read

Building a tag system in Astro

Slug normalisation, tag clouds, ring layouts, paginated archives, and tag page improvements

How this blog's tag system works: from tag slug normalisation and publication-aware counts to the weighted cloud on the blog archive, the ring layout on /tags, paginated tag pages, the sidebar browser, and later improvements including per-tag descriptions, a featured post, related topics, and a stats bar.

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Wooden blocks spelling blog — Photo by Nadiia Ganzhyi on Unsplash

16 Apr 2026, BST · 13 min read

Designing the blog card and post hero

Reading time, cover assets, and the shared contract from card to hero

How the blog listing card and post hero share reading time, cover assets, metadata, and a single visual system from the grid to the full article page.

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White ceramic mug filled with black coffee, viewed from above — Photo by Alex Padurariu on Unsplash

14 Apr 2026, BST · 6 min read

Building a dark/light theme toggle in Astro

CSS custom properties, localStorage persistence, and no flash of wrong theme

How this blog's theme toggle works — a data-theme attribute on the root element, CSS custom properties for every colour, an icon-triggered dropdown for System/Light/Dark selection, and a synchronous inline script to prevent the flash of wrong theme on load.

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Wooden bookcase filled with books — Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

1 Apr 2026, BST · 5 min read

Typed content collections in Astro

Zod schemas, build-time validation, and what the draft flag actually does

How this blog uses Astro content collections with a Zod schema to validate every piece of frontmatter at build time — including typed images, optional fields, and the draft flag pattern that keeps work-in-progress posts off the live site.

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Technology web stack — logos arranged on a desk — Photo by Webstacks on Unsplash

30 Mar 2026, BST · 10 min read

Choosing the tech stack

Every tool was chosen deliberately — here's the reasoning

The full reasoning behind the tech stack for this blog: Astro for static output and content collections, Bulma for a no-runtime CSS foundation, Netlify for deployment and serverless functions, and TypeScript throughout.

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Miniature construction scene — figures building with bricks and a wheelbarrow — Photo by Simone Dinoia on Unsplash

30 Mar 2026, BST · 6 min read

How this blog was built

A series on the technical and design decisions behind Sourcier

A new series documenting the technical and design decisions behind this blog — from choosing Astro and setting up typed content collections, to building dark mode, a comment system, a mailing list, and everything in between.

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Colourful code on a screen — Photo by Chris Ried on Unsplash

24 Mar 2026, GMT · 4 min read

Markdown Test

Markdown syntax reference

Markdown syntax reference testing headings, emphasis, lists, code blocks, tables, links, and more.

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