Migrating the Site to Astro
Behind the scenes I’ve been rebuilding smallindie.dev on Astro instead of Jekyll.
Why bother rewriting it
Jekyll’s done fine for years, but the Ruby/Docker setup had gotten annoying to maintain, and I wanted something with a faster dev loop and less ceremony for the stuff I actually touch often: writing posts and adding new course lessons. Astro turned out to be a good fit — it renders plain HTML by default (no client-side JS unless a page actually needs it), and content lives in real files (Markdown for posts, YAML for course data) instead of a custom Ruby data pipeline.
Important part: every URL stayed exactly the same. Old permalinks, category prefixes, the RSS feed path — all byte-for-byte compatible with what Jekyll generates today, so nothing breaks for anyone who’s bookmarked or linked to a post.
Code snippets got a lot more useful
Course lesson pages show code snippets for whatever’s being built in the video. Those now have:
- A copy button on every code block on the site, not just lessons — click it and it’s on your clipboard.
- A download button on lesson snippets specifically, so you can grab the actual file (
LevelManager.cs,player_spawn.gd, whatever it is) instead of copy-pasting and renaming it yourself.
Take a look at Clean Up Level to see both buttons in action.
New favicon
The placeholder favicon is gone — the browser tab now shows the real smallindie “SI” mark instead of a generic icon.
What’s next?
I’m working on a new video course and trying to polish up my video production process. The LDtk videos will keep coming — there are a few topics I still want to cover there, but the new course will most likely be my priority.
If there’s anything in particular you guys would like to see as always feel free to let me know, and join the Discord server.