Evidence-rated TED Talk experiments site built with Astro 6.x, Preact islands, Pagefind search, and Zod content validation.
3 lessons
Astro's `site` and `base` config fields look like they do the same thing but serve completely different purposes. Getting them wrong produces a site that deploys successfully but generates incorrect canonical URLs, broken sitemaps, or broken routing -- and the failure mode changes depending on wheth...
A site can build and run perfectly in dev mode while harboring type errors that fail `astro check` in CI. If CI gates on type checking (and it should), these latent errors become deploy blockers that surface only after pushing -- never during local development.
When migrating a static site to a hosting platform that serves from a subdirectory (e.g., `username.github.io/repo/`), every hardcoded internal link breaks. The migration isn't done when the deploy workflow is green -- it's done when every `href`, asset path, and client-side route has been audited f...