What do we do with SMIL?

NOTE: This post was published while Rspack’s latest version was v1.0.0-beta.4. Some details are likely to change as Rspack approaches its 1.0 release. Rspack is a Rust-based alternative to Webpack that promises to be faster and includes a few common conveniences too. After a year of trying, I’ve finally finished converting my two largest Webpack...

I wrote most of this post sometime in 2022 but I think it holds up alright in 2024 so I decided to publish it for posterity. I don’t really like doing posts like this—I’d much rather share some innocuous learnings or tips but it turns out I have opinions too 😓 Sorry! 2024-02-21: I’ve added a few reflections at the end of the post. 2024-04-27:...

2024-01-22: I’ve updated this to work with Playwright 1.41. Last week started like every other week, meaning half a dozen projects were broken by half a dozen incompatible dependency updates. There were the usual suspects like Lexical but most noticeable was Playwright.

After over a year of fighting with Eleventy and then Astro to set up a this blog just right I find myself needing to set up yet another blog, this time for work. I could just build on what I’ve got with Astro but I can’t help but wonder if I would have been better off sticking with WordPress after all.

2023-12-14: I’ve heavily updated this to work with Astro 4.0 but for posterity I’ve saved the old version in the Internet Archive. There’s something depressing about a blog about blogging. I never wanted this to be one of those blogs. But I’ve struggled so much with Astro’s image feature these past few weeks that I really hope it will benefit...