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Inside the Cerkit Blog Experience

Inside the Cerkit Blog Experience

By Michael Earls

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When I set out to rebuild Cerkit blog, I wanted a space that highlights tinkering, storytelling, and tools all at once. Astro gave me the flexible foundation, and the AstroPaper theme offered a thoughtful starting point. After several rounds of adjustments, the site now feels like a bespoke cockpit panel—purpose-built for the way I publish.

How the blog is organized

Astro’s file-based routing keeps things intuitive. Every post lives in src/content/blog, where collections handle type safety and automatic metadata validation. Pages such as the home screen (src/pages/index.astro) lean on shared building blocks: a global Layout, reusable headers and footers, and a concise set of helper components for cards, social links, and RSS affordances. Because the content collections and UI partials sit side by side, iterating on structure rarely requires touching more than a couple of files.

Why Astro fits

Astro’s hybrid rendering model is what makes this setup hum. Static pages ship as lightweight HTML, while islands wake up only when needed—perfect for interactive extras like the fleet builder. The official integrations for MDX, image optimization, and RSS generation are wired directly into the build pipeline, so I can focus on writing instead of chasing bundler quirks.

Tailoring the AstroPaper theme

The site still carries AstroPaper’s DNA, but almost every surface has been retouched. Typography scales differently across breakpoints, call-to-action buttons use custom gradients, and the card grid adapts to highlight featured posts. I reworked the hero area to showcase twin character illustrations, folded in a tuned shadow system, and layered additional utility classes to manage spacing and responsive behavior. The result is a theme that feels familiar to AstroPaper veterans yet unmistakably branded for Cerkit blog.

Living in the starfield

The visual identity revolves around a starfield motif. A deep indigo-to-plum gradient forms the base layer, while scattered soft-focus stars and subtle noise textures keep the background from feeling static. Key panels sit on semitransparent glassmorphism cards, letting the starfield peek through without sacrificing readability. Accents—violet flares, cyan highlights, and neon edge glows—trace navigation elements and primary buttons. On larger displays, the hero section picks up a gentle parallax so the field drifts as you scroll, reinforcing the sense of depth.

Fleet builder: charting custom lineups

The fleet builder (src/pages/fleet-builder.html) invites visitors to assemble their own squadron of ships. The interface combines form inputs, live previews, and save-ready output, all wrapped in the site’s electric palette. Astro keeps the markup lean, and a sprinkle of client-side JavaScript manages state changes without dragging performance. Because it shares the global styling tokens, the page feels native to the rest of the blog even though it behaves more like an app.

Inventory manager: keeping the hangar tidy

Complementing the fleet builder is the inventory manager (src/pages/inventory.html). This tool tracks components, upgrades, and loadouts with sortable tables and quick filters. I reused the same starfield-backed panels but swapped the accent color to help users distinguish inventory states at a glance. The data model leans on lightweight JSON, making it easy to publish preconfigured kits or share new parts lists right inside a post.

What it all adds up to

Cerkit blog now runs on a carefully tuned Astro stack, shaped by a modified AstroPaper theme and unified by the starfield aesthetic. Whether you are here to read a longform teardown, configure a fleet, or audit ship components, the experience stays consistent, fast, and just a little bit cosmic. That balance between form and function is exactly why I continue to invest in this platform.

Publishing through GitHub and Cloudflare

The deployment pipeline is just as straightforward as the site design. Every change lands in the GitHub repository, and the moment I push the main branch, Cloudflare picks up the commit, builds the project, and publishes it to their edge. Because I live in Git all day, the workflow feels second nature: branch, write, commit, push, watch it deploy. That frictionless loop keeps the blog fresh—new ideas move from markdown to production in minutes without leaving the tools I already use.


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