Switch from Gatsby to Astro

[john-kurkowski]

Gatsby felt like overkill for this project: a small, static site, that doesn't even use a runtime framework like React.

Changes

• Ensure consistent frontmatter schema across all posts
  • Always write description, instead of relying on automatic excerpt calculation
• Find and replace straight quotes with smart quotes
  • While there, replace most incorrect prose uses of "&" with "and"
  • Remark and Smartypants used to do smart quote replacement automatically at HTML generation time. With Astro and MDX, supposedly the parser only sees 1 quote character at a time, zero context, and Smartypants becomes useless.
  • I did a bulk replace via a combination of smartypants <file> and recode html..utf-8 <file> and manual review.

Discussion

The find-and-replace of smart quotes is the riskiest change in this PR, potentially losing words, like "&".

TODO

• Fix FOUC when navigating between pages in the nav bar
  • I added Astro's <ViewTransition /> to every page. It helps a little.
  • It doesn't seem to happen with links within the site not in the nav, e.g. links from blog post to blog post, or blog post to blog post index.
  • The problem seems to be magnified in production. See the review app here.