My Website's History

The Beginnings

I bought this domain, boxersteavee.dev, all the way back in September 2021, and my website has gone through quite a few evolutions since then. It started out as a basic Google Sites webpage, with a few bits explaining a who I am and other presences I have on the internet. I then played about with Ghost for a while, which is a blogging tool that many news websites use. I ran that for a while until around December 2022, when I first discovered Astro.

An Astro-nomical Discovery

Around December 2022, a friend named Alfie told me about Astro. I gave it a bit of a tinker about, setup a basic site using the default template and gave it a test. I found it cool, but didn’t really know what else to do with it. In Early 2023, I discovered Astro Templated, and picked the Official Portfolio template, which I customised and added content to. This is how my website looked from around February 2023, up until Late-January 2025, when I decided to switch over to Astro Starlight.

Reaching for the stars

In January 2024, I was inspired to switch to Astro Starlight when r/TechSupport switched over to it, after they had been using Just the Docs for Jekyll for many years. Starlight is much simpler than how my website used to look, which I feel is much nicer. It also doesn’t have weird bugs, like flashing from light-mode to dark-mode on every page change.

Switching to Starlight also makes it easier for me to use Hyde, which is a CMS made by the staff team in the r/TechSupport Discord Server. It’s designed for Jekyll sites, but Starlight’s folder structure is very similar, and also uses markdown for pages. I’m quite happy with how my Website looks on Starlight, and I think it’ll be a while before I make another big redesign.

Web Hosting

Web hosting can be complicated. Initially, when this page was just a simple Google Site, Google were the ones that hosted it. During the time I used Ghost, I ran it on my old Raspberry Pi 2B, which worked, although not amazingly. It was very slow to build, and slow to run too. When I started using Astro, I also tried running it on the same Pi instead of Ghost, however I ran into similar issues.

Alfie then told me about Oracle Cloud. After setting up a free tier account, he guided me through setting up CapRover and hosting my Astro Site on there. That is roughly when I started using the Astro Template I had before. It ran like that for quite a while, and was very stable.

I later discovered Cloudflare Pages, and how easy it is to use compared to CapRover. Moving over was as simple as linking GitHub and Cloudflare, setting up a pages instance and clicking “Deploy”. My site has run on Cloudflare Pages perfectly fine and has an uptime on-par with most websites.