After years of paying to host a variety of beautiful “coming soon” pages, I have finally launched danglorioso.com—my personal portfolio and home to my plethora of ever-evolving side projects!
Those who know me well know I’ve had this domain for years—I locked it down from the other Dan Gloriosos over five years ago (sorry, other Dans—hit me up, though). I’ve been spinning up tons of subdomains on it for various projects, but funnily enough, I’ve never published anything meaningful on the root domain itself.
When I first bought this domain, I was hosting a WordPress blog on it—paying a whopping $400 a year to host it. At the time, however, that was the best I knew about modern web development. WordPress was fine at first, but I found it quickly getting bogged down by the number of plugins I needed to install just to get features like an image carousel to work. It felt like every little thing required a quirky workaround. Getting the styling to look exactly how I wanted felt counterproductive. It was limited, and honestly, I never really felt like I truly owned the site, which isn’t what I wanted for the price I was paying.
As I began college and learned more about programming, especially through my work in JumboCode creating websites from scratch for non-profit clients, it felt only natural for me to create my own site from the ground up. So that’s exactly what I did and have been working on on-and-off over the past year.
Admittedly, it has taken a while to publish this site because I’ve been busy with schoolwork, working on other passion projects, and restarting it several times because I wanted it to be just right.
This version of my site is built in Astro, a fairly new framework launched in 2021 that I first started exploring two summers ago. Besides pushing myself to learn something new, I chose Astro for a number of reasons: it embraces a “Bring Your Own Framework (BYOF)” philosophy, which lets me mix and match React, Svelte, Vue, and any other front-end web components into a single project without dealing with overly complicated build configurations and framework conflicts. In fact, many of the components on this site are reused across my other React-based projects.
It also renders pages to static HTML by default, stripping any slow JavaScript away unless explicitly needed, resulting in lightning-fast page loads. Astro also has native support for Markdown, which means I can write blog posts like this one in Markdown (now supported in Apple Notes!) and have them automatically rendered into perfectly-formatted pages with no additional CMS. And as a bonus, it has first-class support for both TypeScript and Tailwind CSS, two of my favorites. Oh, and to sweeten the deal, it’s free and open-source!
Beyond the technical benefits, Astro just felt right for a personal site. It’s flexible enough to grow with me as I toy with new ideas, yet simple enough that I can pivot quickly without getting bogged down in configs. I wanted to build this site with a foundation that could evolve alongside my projects—and one that I had full control over from top to bottom.
So, what can you expect from this blog? I’ll be sharing updates on my latest projects, documenting new technologies and tools I’m experimenting with, and occasionally writing about interesting problems I’ve solved (or am still trying to solve).
Thanks for stopping by, and feel free to explore the site. I’m excited to finally have a home for this, and I’m looking forward to sharing more as I continue building!