Rebuilding vipulnsward.com
Moving my personal site off Lovable and onto a small, self-owned Astro and Cloudflare setup.
I rebuilt this site because I wanted to own the stack again.
Lovable was useful for getting a version online quickly. The tradeoff was that a personal site started to feel like someone else’s project. I wanted the code in my repository, the deployment in my account, and every page understandable without tracing a generated application.
The new stack is intentionally small:
- Astro 5 for static pages
- Tailwind CSS 4 for design tokens and utilities
- Markdown content collections for the blog
- Cloudflare Workers static assets for hosting
- Plain CSS and a little browser JavaScript for animation
There is no React runtime and no CMS. A post is a Markdown file. A production build is a directory of static assets. That is enough for this site.
The move also gives me a clean base for side projects. I can put experiments on subdomains, keep their code separate, and link them from here without pushing more responsibility into the main site.
Most importantly, the setup is easy to leave alone. Personal sites often become technology demos that need more maintenance than the writing they are meant to support. I would rather spend that time writing about Rails, open source work, and the practical details of running Saeloun.
Owning the stack does not mean building everything. It means choosing the few pieces I am comfortable maintaining and removing the rest.