Fixing an Old Astro Site After Two Years Away

Fixing an Old Astro Site After Two Years Away

I recently built a new PC and realized I had not touched my personal website since 2024.

The site was originally built with Astro and hosted through GitHub Pages with a custom domain. At the time, everything worked great. Then life, work, kids, projects, and a hundred other distractions happened, and the site slowly became dormant.

After setting up my new machine, I decided to get the full development environment running again from scratch.

I quickly realized how many moving pieces had quietly accumulated over the years.

The rebuild started simple enough:

  • Install Git
  • Install Node.js/npm
  • Clone the repository
  • Run the Astro development server

Within an hour I was deep into debugging old deployment configurations, Astro routing, GitHub Actions, GitHub Pages, and custom domain issues that I had completely forgotten about.

Some of the issues I ran into:

  • Missing Git and Node installations
  • Astro frontmatter validation errors
  • Old /docs GitHub Pages deployments conflicting with Astro’s newer /dist output
  • Broken custom domain routing
  • CNAME placement issues
  • GitHub Actions deployment problems
  • Old configuration leftovers from my original Mac setup

At one point, the site was successfully deploying but still returning a 404 on both the GitHub Pages URL and my custom domain. The final issue ended up being a mix of outdated deployment settings and an old GitHub Pages workflow still trying to publish from the wrong folder.

The fix ultimately came down to:

  • Switching GitHub Pages fully over to GitHub Actions
  • Updating the Astro config for the custom domain
  • Moving the CNAME file into the public directory
  • Rebuilding the deployment workflow from scratch

Once everything finally went live again, I realized the biggest thing I had actually rebuilt was not the website itself.

It was the workflow.

There is something satisfying about getting back into:

  • building
  • debugging
  • writing
  • shipping
  • and making ideas public again

Over the last few years I have accumulated a strange mix of interests and projects:

  • analytics dashboards
  • automation
  • investing systems
  • Raspberry Pi projects
  • AI workflows
  • local research projects
  • trading ideas
  • data visualization
  • scripting and infrastructure

This site will probably become a place to document more of that moving forward.

Not everything needs to become a startup or a polished product. Sometimes it is enough to simply build things, document the process, and keep the momentum alive.

For now, this post is mostly a checkpoint.

The site is back online. The workflow is working again. And builder mode is officially reactivated.