My personal site — a single left-anchored column of text, a bit of writing, and a procedural pattern drifting in the margin. Built with Astro, hand-written CSS, and no component libraries.
Live at mihaicristian.dev.
bun install
bun devThen open http://localhost:4321. Other scripts:
bun run build— build the static site todist/bun run preview— serve the build locallybun run check— type-check the Astro and TypeScript files
Any recent Node works too if you'd rather use npm.
src/
components/ CustomCursor, PassionPattern, WritingTimeline
content/ the writing, as Markdown/MDX
data/ site metadata (site.ts) and the quote list (quotes.ts)
layouts/ Base.astro — the shared <head>, fonts, and shell
pages/ index, the 404, /writing, and the RSS feed
styles/ global.css — colors, type, and the reset
Drop an .mdx (or .md) file into src/content/writing/. The filename becomes
the URL slug. Each post needs a little frontmatter:
---
title: 'Be Curious'
description: 'A line for the listing and the RSS feed.'
date: 2025-02-13
draft: false # optional — drafts are hidden in production
---
Your words here.New posts show up on the home page, the /writing timeline, and in rss.xml
automatically, newest first.
- One column, anchored left. No header, no footer, no theme toggle. Light and dark come straight from the system preference.
- The margin pattern. Every load draws one of five procedural motifs — one per
thing I care about (circuits, a labyrinth, a map grid, a helix, a star field).
Force one with
?pattern=0..4if you want to see a specific one. - The cursor is a small accent-colored dot that lags the pointer and becomes a crosshair over links. It steps aside for touch and reduced-motion.
Everything degrades gracefully: the ornament is decorative, hidden from screen readers and on narrow screens, and the site reads fine without any of it.