My Portfolio EN
Initial Commit

Published: 8 March 2026

Initial Commit

Hello world! What's the story? TL:DR Why I changed from Wordpress on Namecheap to Astro/Sanity on Github - €€€ & cool factor

Why did you make this site? Didn't you already have one?

Yes I did! I was hosting it through Namecheap, but it was totally overkill for what I needed, and I was using Wordpress, which felt like total overkill and honestly super clunky!

I had a few issues with the hosting:

  • €€€ - I was hemorrhaging euros to host a static website
  • Overkill - the lowest-tier hosting plan was a bit overly powerful, given the traffic I receive :P
  • Clunky! - I actually hate cPanel, I'm sure it's great but I really just didn't enjoy logging into it, it also wouldn't resolve when I'm on eduroam - super annoying!

Apart from that, I was very happy - 0 downtime over the past year, quick load times and a fairly rich CMS

So why the change?

A little bit of change never hurt anyone! I want to demonstrate my love of open source and of coding (which I'm really not good at). I've made many failed attempts at creating a static blog/portfolio with a lot of different frameworks and even vanilla JS/CSS. But I found Astro and fell in love, it's really really cool and a massive learning opportunity as I discovered Sanity - a Content Management System so I didn't need to mess around with Markdown or my prior attempts - raw HTML!

Super duper new to this and I've leveraged a lot of help from the Astro/Sanity docs, Github and Namecheap docs, etc etc. (Github education is GOATed!)

Also wouldn't it be cool to show a potential employer my portfolio and then say: "I made this, by the way"?

In all honesty it's just that Github Pages has free hosting lol