Kev's logbook — Kevin Aleman's blog

A personal blog about life, engineering, and games. Built with Astro, styled with a custom "Engineering Logbook" editorial design, and deployed to Netlify.

Stack

• Astro (static output) with content collections for articles and talks
• Hand-written CSS design tokens (no Tailwind) — light mode, three typefaces (Space Grotesk / Newsreader / JetBrains Mono) self-hosted via @fontsource
• Shiki for code highlighting, remark-reading-time for read times
• RSS via @astrojs/rss; sitemap via @astrojs/sitemap; contact form via Netlify Forms
• Per-article social share cards rendered at build time with satori + resvg (src/pages/og/[slug].png.js); public/og-default.png covers the non-article pages
• Client-side ⌘K search palette (SearchPalette.astro) over an inlined index — no backend
• /stats — the log in numbers (entries, words, read time, per-year and tag breakdowns)

Develop

npm install
npm run dev       # local dev server
npm run build     # production build → dist/
npm run preview   # preview the built site
npm run check     # type-check (astro check)
npm run test      # unit tests (vitest)

Content

Articles live in src/content/articles/*.md. Frontmatter:

idx: 1                       # stable publication number (ascending by date)
title: "…"
date: 2020-10-02T00:00:00Z
slug: "the-beauty-of-node-streams"   # the URL path (overrides the filename)
tags: ["nodejs", "streams"]
excerpt: "…"
draft: false
featured: false
featuredImage: "../../assets/images/stream.jpg"   # local asset, optional
# coverImage: "https://…"    # remote image (dev.to imports), optional
# canonicalUrl / devtoUrl    # set on imported articles

slug preserves the article's public URL — do not change it for existing posts. Talks are listed in src/content/talks/talks.json.

Importing dev.to articles

1. Get your dev.to API key (Settings → Extensions → API Keys).
2. DEVTO_API_KEY=xxx SITE_URL=https://your-site npm run import:devto
3. Re-run anytime — existing files are skipped when either the slug or the article title already exists locally, so your hand-migrated posts are not duplicated. Pass -- --force to overwrite. Note: --force rewrites existing files and re-assigns idx from the current max, so it can renumber posts. Prefer the default (skip) for incremental imports; only use --force for a full re-sync and review the diff.
4. Review the new src/content/articles/*.md (and git status), then commit.

The blog is the canonical source; imported articles carry a devtoUrl that renders an "also on dev.to ↗" mirror link.

Analytics

Privacy-friendly, cookieless GoatCounter. Set the PUBLIC_GOATCOUNTER environment variable (in the Netlify UI) to your count endpoint, e.g. https://abcdev.goatcounter.com/count. When unset, no analytics script is emitted, so local dev and previews stay tracking-free. The script also skips localhost on its own. No cookie-consent banner is required.

Deploy

Pushed to Netlify via CI. netlify.toml pins the build (npm run build → dist/) and Node 22.