Having fun with static generation

I recently moved my blog to Astro. Since then I’ve been having an absolute blast with the static site generation process! I love being able to hydrate the site with dynamic data while keeping things fast on the server. It reminds me of HotSyncing data onto a Palm Pilot (how could I not reference Palm Pilots after my last post). Here’s a few cool things that happen when my site is built: Fetch and display analytics I started using GoatCounter (awesome service) and have been leveraging their API to show stats on my site via a custom build plugin. My analytics page now shows statically generated graphs of the analytics data as of the last site build. Additionally, posts now feature a “readers” count in the header. Image dithering The previous iteration of my blog featured dithered images. While this was partly an aesthetic choice, it also greatly reduces the size of images. The downside was the amount of work involved in manually dithering images via ImageMagick for each post. Thanks to…