Cyber Post

My Blog - revised

Apr 21, 2026 by J

Updated Apr 2026 5 tags
What to expect

Real challenges, actual solutions, and what I learned in the process.

This post talks about everything related to the creation of this blog - the new and revised version!

with the help of Copilot of course…

Introduction

Welcome to the new and revised version of my blog! Its about time that I get back to studying. I’ve been wayy to busy learning at work and havent really had the time and energy to get back to what I had plan for 2026. But here we are, finally revamping everything.

Challenges

There were several issues with my previous stack (Nodejs with express) that was holding my back from efficiently creating / documenting down my thoughts. Of all the biggest issues, the top 2:

  1. Hosting a Node server, without cold starts, is really expensive in the long run. It cost roughly about 7usd per month for just a basic plan.
  2. It was super tedious to be writing a post in HTLM tags and manually linking images and links.

Solution

I found the perfect solution in a product called Astro 🔗. Astro improves website performance by rendering components on the server, sending lightweight HTML to the browser with zero unnecessary JavaScript overhead. In essence, I would be able to build static HTML files using Astro and deploy it for free using services like GitHub Pages / CloudFlare workers. Astro also had features that allowed me to create “collections” in markdown files which automatically gets built into HTML files upon compilation.

Of course, I had to engage the help of Copilot to refactor my codebase - which took roughly 2 hours instead of 2 weeks if I did it manually.

Improvements

I’ve since made some small improvements that I’m super happy about.

Dynamically updated dataTables

Gone are the days where i have to manually update the js file, now it reads the Astro collection and automatically displays the contents based on the markdown schema provided.

Error handling

The site has error handling upon a malform page visit, which will lead the user to 404 page. This feature is provided by wrangler - cloudflare worker config.

"assets": {
    ...
    ...
    "not_found_handling": "404-page"
},
Markdown contents

All blog posts are done via Markdown and automatically formatted into the style you’re reading right now. No more hassle of working manually writing html texts and updating javascripts.

My content files all follow this format down, and the rest is handled by the Astro. The schema is show below, and the fields are defined in the content.config.ts file and used in the [slug].astro file.

---
title: "My Blog - revised"
slug: "my-blog-2"
description: "Apr 21, 2026 by J"
date: "Apr 2026"
order: 20
tags:
  - "Astro"
  - "Web Dev"
  - "Bootstrap"
  - "Cloudflare pages"
  - "Copilot"
---
Hosting

Site is now hosted on CloudFlare pages, with zero cold starts as this is now a static HTML site. The response times are way faster as well. The best part about this change is that its totally free!