Bradley Burgess | organist & pianist
Project Links
Project overview
This is the static site for my music activities. The site has taken many forms over the years. It started out as a Wordpress site, but back then I didn’t know very much about web development, and the site was subject to some SQL attacks. After that I decided to move to Squarespace, and that site lasted a little while. After I got more serious about development, I launched a Gatsby.js site. It served its purpose, but I wasn’t thrilled about the performance.
I eventually discovered 11ty, and loved it from the first moment. It was like Jekyll and Hugo, but I loved the simplicity it provided while at the same time being Javascript-centric. (This was back before I had experience in any other languages.) 11ty is great for purely static sites, but I wanted a tiny bit of backend functionality, and didn’t want an entirely separate backend. Then Astro came out, and I jumped on it. I still love 11ty, but Astro is now my go-to SSG framework, being simultaneously very powerful and simple.
Technical details
The site is built with Astro, and uses a very little bit of Javascript. The main areas that are client-side are the music playlist area and the contact form. The music playlist I built from scratch and is a Web Component. The contact form is a React component that communicates with an Astro api on the backend and sends me a Telegram message. Styling is done almost completely with Tailwind.