标签：#astro

Last month I finally did some math I'd been putting off: how much I was actually paying to keep a bunch of sites online. $39/month on Hostinger (about R$200, I'm in Brazil). For hosting 10+ sites: product landing pages, blogs, a couple of small tools. Every month, on autopilot, straight off the card. Then I asked myself the obvious question I'd been avoiding: out of those 10+ sites, how many actually need a server running 24/7? Answer: none. What these sites actually are A product landing page doesn't need PHP processing a request. A blog doesn't need a database query on every page view. A marketing site doesn't change its content every second. That's HTML, CSS, and JS you can generate once and serve from a CDN. In other words: a static site. A few real examples I migrated: eduardovillao.me → my personal blog, built with Astro formroute.dev → a SaaS landing page, plain HTML wpfeatureloop.com → a dev tool landing page, plain HTML Three different kinds of sites (blog, SaaS, dev tool), two different stacks, and none of them needed a server running around the clock just to exist. The reason I hadn't migrated sooner wasn't technical. It was inertia. "It's already paid for, it already works, leave it alone." Classic. The migration I moved everything to Cloudflare Pages . The reasoning is boring because it's so simple: it's free, global CDN, automatic SSL, Git-based deploys, custom domains at no extra cost. For static sites, there's really nothing to debate. The process, in short: Each site became a repo (or a folder inside a monorepo, depending on the case) Connected the repo to Cloudflare Pages Set up the build, mostly plain HTML, Astro for the blog where I wanted content collections and a proper writing workflow Pointed the domain, SSL came up on its own Cancelled hosting for that domain on Hostinger Repeated that site by site. No magic, just repetitive work, but each one took about 20-30 minutes. (If you want the technical deep dive on one specific migration, including

The FCC authorized Reflect Orbital to launch the mirror satellite Eärendil-1. “For optical astronomy, this poses an existential threat,” the European Southern Observatory said.

I built Luxury Hotel Offers , a fully static site with 3,400+ listings that generates 4,400 HTML pages at build time. No SSR, no database at runtime. Here are the four hardest scaling problems I hit. 1. Googlebot's 2 MB HTML Limit With 3,400 hotels on one listing page, the naive approach (render all cards in HTML) produced a 9 MB page. Googlebot truncates at 2 MB and ignores the rest. The fix: cap the initial HTML at 400 cards. The remaining 2,500+ cards are generated as a separate HTML fragment file at a predictable URL ( /data/cards/{slug}-remaining/ ). A "Load More" button injects 48 cards at a time from the fragment. The first search or filter interaction loads the entire fragment so all cards are available for client-side filtering. This keeps every page under 2 MB for crawlers while giving users access to everything. 2. Content-Aware Lastmod with Cascading A site with 4,400 pages can't update every lastmod on every build. Search engines treat that as spam, and IndexNow has rate implications. Instead, the build hashes each hotel's SEO-relevant fields and compares against a persisted store. Only pages with actual content changes get their lastmod bumped. The interesting part is cascading: when a hotel in Paris changes, the Paris city page, France country page, and Europe region page all get their dates updated too, since their content changed (they list that hotel). Changed URLs feed into IndexNow so only genuinely modified pages get pushed to search engines. 3. DOM Filtering Breaks on Mobile at Scale The site started with pure DOM filtering: every card has data-* attributes for region, country, brand, and perks. JavaScript reads attributes and toggles visibility. Zero network requests, instant results. Great on desktop. On a mid-range phone with 2,500+ cards in the DOM, filtering took 2-3 seconds per interaction. textContent traversal across 20-40 nodes per card means ~60,000 DOM visits per keystroke. Layout thrashing with 10,000+ nodes made every show/hide cyc

It's unclear how the planet avoided its star's bloated red giant stage.

"I have been waiting a long time to finally get up there..."

Something on Pluto and one of Saturn’s moons, Titan, absorbs light in a way unexplained by anything in spectroscopic databases.

A new study suggests that when our star becomes unstable in 5 billion years or so, Earth may avoid being engulfed by its fiery demise.

A study based on 47 million galaxies found that the cosmic web retains patterns on enormous scales, which could force a reevaluation of a pillar of cosmology.

A tour of the stack behind mattstratton.com and speaking.mattstratton.com: a monorepo holding two Astro sites and a dev.to sync tool, twenty years of blog posts, and the pipeline that crossposts posts like this one.

The heat of the Hadean may have come from impacts as well as the interior.

Walkthrough experience includes visits to stars, exoplanets, and observatories.

CalcMora just crossed 200 live tools calculators and converters spanning finance, health, math, unit conversions, date/time, everyday life, and sports. It's a small milestone against the bigger target (3,000 tools within a year), but it's the first one that felt like proof the approach actually works. What CalcMora is A free calculator and converter site, built to be fast and genuinely useful rather than bloated with unnecessary interactivity. Every tool lives on its own page, static by default, ad-supported, and designed to actually rank and hold up in search rather than just exist. The stack is intentionally boring: Astro for static output, hosted on Cloudflare Pages . No client-side framework runtime, no heavy JS bundles. That choice is mostly why the site stays fast even as the tool count climbs into the hundreds; static pages don't get slower just because there are more of them. Consistency at scale Going from a handful of tools to 200 forced us to think hard about repeatability. Every tool page follows the same underlying template: a calculator, supporting explanatory content, an FAQ section, and standard trust/attribution elements (author info, last-updated date, disclaimers where relevant). That consistency is what makes it realistic to keep scaling toward thousands of pages without every single one needing a bespoke pass. Structured data (schema.org markup) is baked into every page too; it's a big part of why individual calculators show up well in search, and it's applied consistently rather than as an afterthought. New: embeddable tools The other big addition alongside the 200-tool mark is an embed system — every tool on CalcMora can now be dropped into someone else's site as a lightweight, ad-free widget. Site owners get a copy-paste snippet, no signup required. The implementation leans on a couple of iframe and query-param tricks to keep embedded calculators fast and chrome-free (no header, footer, or ads, just the tool), without needing any JS framework

The Euclid space telescope's stunning photo of our galaxy's “crowded heart” captures more than 60 million stars.

The asteroid will be visible for several nights from different parts of the world. We’ll tell you when and where to look, and what equipment you’ll need to spot it.

At the right point of the orbit and stellar cycle, the star's chromosphere brightens.

Researchers say the discovery could be a “Rosetta stone” for cosmic signals.

After spending two weeks debugging issues that only showed up in production — a sitemap _redirects rule that was blocking my own sitemap-index.xml and a Bluesky image upload race against Cloudflare Pages deploy lag — I added three post-deploy checks to my workflow. They're fast and specific to the failure modes I've actually hit, not a full end-to-end test suite. Three sites (aiappdex.com, findindiegame.com, ossfind.com) on Cloudflare Pages with Astro 5 SSG. Here's what I check. Check 1: Sitemap reachability The simplest check and the one I should have had from day one. After a Cloudflare Pages deploy, I verify that sitemap-index.xml is reachable and returning 200 on all three domains: for domain in aiappdex.com findindiegame.com ossfind.com ; do status = $( curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" "https:// $domain /sitemap-index.xml" ) echo " $domain /sitemap-index.xml → $status " if [ " $status " != "200" ] ; then echo "FAIL: $domain sitemap unreachable" fi done I also check sitemap-0.xml — the actual URL sub-sitemap that @astrojs/sitemap generates — and assert that it contains at least a minimum expected URL count. For aiappdex.com that threshold is 1,000; if it drops below that after a deploy, the ETL data pipeline probably broke silently. The reason this check exists: I had a _redirects rule rewriting sitemap-index.xml → sitemap-0.xml as an emergency workaround that turned out to be wrong. It was live for five days before I found it. The rule was blocking the real sitemap-index.xml from reaching crawlers while appearing fine in the browser (which followed the redirect). Curl with -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" doesn't follow redirects by default, so it would have caught this immediately. Check 2: IndexNow batch submission After every successful sitemap check, I run node scripts/indexnow.mjs . The script reads the live sitemap XML from each domain, collects all URLs, and POSTs them to the IndexNow endpoint for Bing, Yandex, Naver, and Seznam using site-specific k

After spending two weeks debugging issues that only showed up in production — a sitemap _redirects rule that was blocking my own sitemap-index.xml and a Bluesky image upload race against Cloudflare Pages deploy lag — I added three post-deploy checks to my workflow. They're fast and specific to the failure modes I've actually hit, not a full end-to-end test suite. Three sites (aiappdex.com, findindiegame.com, ossfind.com) on Cloudflare Pages with Astro 5 SSG. Here's what I check. Check 1: Sitemap reachability The simplest check and the one I should have had from day one. After a Cloudflare Pages deploy, I verify that sitemap-index.xml is reachable and returning 200 on all three domains: for domain in aiappdex.com findindiegame.com ossfind.com ; do status = $( curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" "https:// $domain /sitemap-index.xml" ) echo " $domain /sitemap-index.xml → $status " if [ " $status " != "200" ] ; then echo "FAIL: $domain sitemap unreachable" fi done I also check sitemap-0.xml — the actual URL sub-sitemap that @astrojs/sitemap generates — and assert that it contains at least a minimum expected URL count. For aiappdex.com that threshold is 1,000; if it drops below that after a deploy, the ETL data pipeline probably broke silently. The reason this check exists: I had a _redirects rule rewriting sitemap-index.xml → sitemap-0.xml as an emergency workaround that turned out to be wrong. It was live for five days before I found it. The rule was blocking the real sitemap-index.xml from reaching crawlers while appearing fine in the browser (which followed the redirect). Curl with -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" doesn't follow redirects by default, so it would have caught this immediately. Check 2: IndexNow batch submission After every successful sitemap check, I run node scripts/indexnow.mjs . The script reads the live sitemap XML from each domain, collects all URLs, and POSTs them to the IndexNow endpoint for Bing, Yandex, Naver, and Seznam using site-specific k

"I consider this a success already, just from the fact that we're even going to try this."

Will the Sun roast Earth’s plants or starve them?