标签：#astro

University of Leicester historian thinks Eilmer of Malmesbury saw two different comets: in 1018 and 1066

This article was originally published on hawksley.dev . I've owned the domain name hawksley.dev for a while now, but I've never done much with it aside from sending email. Over the weekend, I thought I might as well make good use of it and decided to create a blog. In the beginning, this site had a humble home page with some links to GitHub projects. A blog requires much more infrastructure for me to use it effectively. For one, it'd be great if I could just write my posts in Markdown and have them formatted by my project automatically. Having a look at the options available, the first that stood out was GitHub's Jekyll . It looked nice and had great integration with GitHub Pages, which I'm hosting with at the time of writing. However, it just felt too rigid. I needed something modern that I felt I could get my hands dirty with. Enter Astro. Why Astro In the grand scheme of things, the Astro framework is pretty new at just 5 years old. That hasn't prevented it from gaining popularity rapidly. It holds performance as a key design principle, anything that can be static will render statically. By default, it ships absolutely no JS to the browser, which felt perfect for my use case. I have no need for advertising or heavy tracking scripts weighing down my site. All I need is a place to write. Learning how to work with Astro was completely painless. I created a new GitHub repository and followed along with their very high-quality documentation to create a blog of my own. At the very end of it, I’d created a nice neat blog that loaded instantly and was easy to write for. I wasn't satisfied by using the tutorial's blog for my site, though, as it felt too cookie-cutter, and so I started again, now with confidence in the framework. The Design Decisions There were some definite design decisions I knew I wanted from the get-go. First-class light mode and dark mode support were a must. Plenty of blogs offered just one or the other, and after a bit of digging, it didn't seem tec

"It is actually challenging how you measure [Mach] from space."

New simulations reveal that the moons of Uranus may retain traces of giant planets.

I've been building a static Astro site on Cloudflare Pages over the last few weeks. Sharing the 3 deployment bugs that cost me the most time, in case they save anyone else the same loop. Setup Astro 5 + Cloudflare Pages + Tailwind 4. Content lives in a few JSON files; each page is a dynamic route mapped over the data. Free-tier hosting, no backend. Standard static-first stack. Bug 1: Trailing-slash 307 chain I started with trailingSlash: 'never' in Astro config. Build output went to dist/foo/index.html . Result: Astro emitted canonical tags as /foo (no slash), but Cloudflare Pages served /foo/ (auto-adding the slash via 307). Google Search Console flagged pages as "Redirect error" because the canonical URL pointed at a redirect chain instead of a real 200. I first tried build.format: 'file' to get flat dist/foo.html output, hoping that would bypass the trailing slash. That made it worse — Cloudflare still 307-stripped, but now to a non-existent .html file → 404. Fix: stop fighting the platform. ​ js // astro.config.mjs export default defineConfig({ trailingSlash: 'always', // ... }); ​ trailingSlash: 'always' plus default directory build aligns the canonical URL with what Pages actually serves. The redirect errors resolved on next re-crawl. Bug 2: _redirects rejected at deploy I tried to do a www → apex 301 in public/_redirects : https://www.example.com/* https://example.com/:splat 301! Cloudflare rejected the deploy with three validation errors: ​ Line 13: Only relative URLs are allowed. Line 22: Duplicate rule for path /foo. Line 23: Duplicate rule for path /bar. ​ Pages tightened _redirects validation — absolute-URL sources aren't accepted anymore. The duplicate errors were because Astro's own redirects config in astro.config.mjs generates HTML meta-refresh files that Pages parses as implicit redirect rules — conflicting with my explicit ones. Fix: delete _redirects entirely. Use a Cloudflare Redirect Rule from the dashboard for cross-host 301s (Wildcard pattern,

Stop shipping a 1990s C library to compute planets. Xalen is the pure-Rust, Apache-2.0 replacement for Swiss Ephemeris. If your app does astrology, you already know the dependency. Swiss Ephemeris: a C library from the 1990s, a folder of binary .se1 data files you have to ship and locate at runtime, and a license that is either AGPL or you pay for a commercial seat. For 30 years it was the only serious option, so everyone just swallowed the cost. That era is over. Xalen Ephemeris is a full planetary engine written in pure Rust, with no unsafe in the core engine (the only unsafe lives in the optional FFI, Node and WASM binding crates), released under Apache-2.0. No C toolchain. No data files to ship. No copyleft clause waiting for the day you try to make money. It is built to replace Swiss Ephemeris in production, not to admire it from a distance. Python is live on PyPI and the Rust crates are live on crates.io: # Python pip install xalen # Rust cargo add xalen-ephem xalen-time xalen-ayanamsa xalen-vedic Node and WASM build straight from the repo. Repo: https://github.com/vedika-io/xalen-ephemeris Switching takes one line Xalen ships a pyswisseph-shaped API on purpose. Migrating an existing codebase is a find-and-replace: # before import swisseph as swe # after import xalen.swe as swe jd = swe . julday ( 1990 , 6 , 15 , 10.5 ) xx , ok = swe . calc_ut ( jd , swe . SUN , swe . FLG_SWIEPH | swe . FLG_SPEED ) # same argument order, same SE_/SEFLG_/SIDM_ constants, same tuple layout Your function calls do not change. Your data-file directory disappears. Your license problem disappears. Xalen vs Swiss Ephemeris Line them up and the gap is hard to miss. Swiss Ephemeris is C from the 1990s, shipped as a native library you compile and link, fed by .se1 data files you have to bundle and locate at runtime, under AGPL or a paid commercial license. Xalen is pure Rust with no unsafe in the core engine, thread-safe, with no native dependency and no data files for the analytical eng

I'll be honest, when I first heard about Astro, I was skeptical. Another JavaScript framework? I already had React, Next.js was doing fine. Why bother? Then I actually used it. I built the website for Zimnovate, my AI-native digital product studio based in Harare, Zimbabwe, with Astro, ran it through Google PageSpeed Insights, and got scores I'd never seen before on a site I actually built myself. That changed everything for me. Let me tell you what Astro is, why it's architecturally different, and why it's worth learning, especially if you care about performance and SEO. What Even Is Astro? Astro is a web framework built around one radical idea: ship zero JavaScript by default . Most modern frameworks (React, Vue, Svelte) are component-based and hydrate the entire page on the client. Even if your page is mostly static content, the user's browser still downloads and runs JavaScript to render it. Astro flips this. It renders your components to pure HTML at build time. JavaScript only runs in the browser when you explicitly need it, and only for the specific components that need it. This isn't just a config option. It's the core architecture. The Architecture: Islands Astro uses a pattern called Islands Architecture . Think of your page as a static ocean with interactive "islands" floating in it. The ocean (static content, headings, text, images) ships as plain HTML. The islands (a navbar with a dropdown, a contact form, a live counter) are the only parts that hydrate with JavaScript. --- // This runs only at build time zero runtime cost const services = await fetch('/api/services').then(r => r.json()) --- <html> <body> <!-- Pure static HTML, no JS needed --> <h1>Zimnovate</h1> {services.map(service => <ServiceCard service={service} />)} <!-- This island hydrates only when visible --> <ContactForm client:visible /> </body> </html> The client:visible directive tells Astro: "only load this component's JavaScript when it scrolls into the viewport." You get full interacti

22 Astro Best Practices: The Bookmark-Worthy Tips At QuotyAI I'm using Astro to build landing pages and blog posts, so I have hands-on experience how to use it properly and how to vibe-code without headache. Astro is the best framework for content sites right now - #1 in developer satisfaction in the State of JS 2025 survey, with Cloudflare backing it since January 2026. But like any tool, it rewards people who use it the way it was designed. This is the reference I wish I had when I started. Whether you're building your first Astro project or vibe-coding a blog at 2am, these are the habits worth forming from day one. Heads up on versions: This article covers Astro 6.x (released March 2026) and Astro 6.4 (released May 2026). Some APIs from older tutorials are now deprecated - those are called out explicitly below. Always check the upgrade guide when moving between majors. 🖼️ Assets & Media 1. Use <Image /> instead of <img /> Astro's built-in <Image /> component does a lot of work at build time that plain <img> tags leave on the table: it converts images to WebP, generates the right width and height attributes to prevent layout shift, and compresses everything without you touching a single config file. --- import { Image } from 'astro:assets'; import hero from '../assets/hero.png'; --- <!-- ✅ Optimized: converted to WebP, compressed, no layout shift --> <Image src={hero} alt="Hero image" /> <!-- ❌ Skips all of that --> <img src="/hero.png" alt="Hero image" /> For art-direction scenarios (different images at different breakpoints), reach for <Picture /> instead. 2. Use the Astro 6 Built-in Fonts API Almost every website uses custom fonts, but getting them right is surprisingly complicated - performance tradeoffs, privacy concerns, self-hosting, fallback generation, and preload hints. Astro 6 added a built-in Fonts API that handles all of it for you. Configure your fonts in astro.config.mjs : // astro.config.mjs import { defineConfig , fontProviders } from ' astro/conf

If you've trained a transformer in the last three years, your GPU spent most of its wall-clock time inside a matrix multiplication. The kernels doing that work were probably written by cuBLAS, generated by a compiler stack like Triton, or hand-assembled on top of NVIDIA's CUTLASS templates. CUTLASS is the one most people don't see directly, but it sits underneath a surprising amount of modern AI infrastructure — from FlashAttention to vLLM to several internal kernels inside PyTorch. What CUTLASS actually is CUTLASS — CUDA Templates for Linear Algebra Subroutines — is a header-only C++ template library NVIDIA publishes on GitHub under Apache 2.0. It is not a drop-in replacement for cuBLAS. cuBLAS gives you a closed-source binary with a stable API: you call cublasGemmEx and you get a tuned kernel. CUTLASS gives you the building blocks to write your own kernel, with control over tile sizes, data layouts, epilogues, and how the kernel decomposes work across the GPU's memory hierarchy. That control is the point. If you're building a custom inference engine and your projection layer needs to fuse a GEMM with a SiLU activation and a residual add, cuBLAS can't fuse the epilogue for you — you'd launch the GEMM, then a separate elementwise kernel, paying twice for global memory traffic. With CUTLASS, the epilogue is a template parameter. You write the fusion once, instantiate the template, and the compiler emits a single kernel. This is why CUTLASS shows up wherever standard cuBLAS shapes don't fit — unusual data types like FP8, custom epilogues, sparse or grouped GEMMs, attention-shaped matrix products. Anywhere the stock library doesn't have what someone needs and the performance ceiling matters, you tend to find a CUTLASS kernel. CUTLASS is not a productivity library. It is a kernel-author's library. If you're writing PyTorch model code, you'll never import cutlass directly — you'll consume kernels that were built on top of it. The audience here is people who write the ker

The black hole accounts for over two-thirds the mass of the object it inhabits.