About this site

This site used to be built with Gatsby JS as a SPA that called a cloud function to get data on each page load.

• Gatsby JS is deprecated
• Wanted to move the code to a monorepo
• Simplify: use a static site generator instead making a request per load - no cloud function; also wanted FAST, no JS if possible
• Use a cron job to regenerate the site

This site before and now I think had decent UX. The whole reason I built this site in the first place is that it was tribal knowledge buried in Facebook posts on when it was possible to climb certain places. No fault to the Army Corps of Engineers, but their website is hard to use.

So, the main purpose of this site is to capture what water height you can climb somewhere and then pull in data to make it easily understandable if you can climb or not.

Technology

I'm a big fan of Next.JS but I wanted to try something new; so I went with Astro JS.

A Github Action that runs as a cron job will regenerate this site with the latest data.

I thought about self hosting but I want uptime. I use Cloudflare tunnels for self hosting a few things but recently learned about Cloudflare Pages. This seemed like a winner: no egress cost - not that I expect much traffic.

Finally, for look and feel, I decided to go with Matcha CSS. I was getting burnt out on component libraries like MUI and Tailwind. I wanted the CSS to do most of the work, no classes needed if possible.