Astro Weekly #12

WP Engine shines bright with Starlight, optimize fonts in your Astro project, expose your local server to the Internet

Author

Nathan Lawson
December 19, 2023

It’s the final Astro Weekly of 2023!

As we start winding down for the year, I'd like to take a moment to reflect on the past 12 weeks since the launch of Astro Weekly.

In this short amount of time, we've witnessed the rollout of five minor releases, commencing with Astro 3.2 and culminating in the recent launch of Astro 4.0 just a few weeks ago.

I’ve shared some incredible projects from the community, such as LaunchFast, Darkmatter, and Qwik, among others, as well as a plethora of resources, inspiring Astro projects in our weekly showcase, and everything in between.

It's amusing to reflect on the time before launching this newsletter when I had reservations about whether there would be enough content to sustain a weekly edition. Ironically, the challenge now lies in deciding what to cut each week, given the abundance of incredible work to cover.

Astro has been experiencing remarkable traction within the developer community, and I'm eagerly anticipating the exciting developments set to unfold in the next 12 months for both Astro and Astro Weekly.

However, before we embark on that journey, let's take a final look in 2023 at what’s been happening this week.

This week in Astro ✨

Managing documentation at scale

WP Engine shines bright with Starlight 🌟

Did you know? WP Engine, the world's largest managed WordPress hosting provider, welcomes a staggering 8% of all internet users daily.

However, when it came to their documentation, the WP Engine team faced a hurdle: more time was spent on maintaining their docs codebase than actual documentation creation.

In a new case study, Astro has published the incredible results of WP Engine’s decision to build their new Atlas documentation site with Starlight, the documentation theme built on Astro.

  • Starlight lowered development costs by over 50%

  • Atlas team spends 95% of their time on content and almost zero time on code maintenance and configuration

  • WP Engine’s content operations are more than 2x faster 

“It’s [Starlight] just so much better in terms of experience for our customers but it also saved SO MANY HOURS of my life that I’d otherwise have to spend meticulously testing and shaping new pages to Atlas docs.”

Product Manager at WP Engine

For a full breakdown of WP Engine’s transition to Starlight, check out the official Astro blog.

Astro Community 🧑‍🚀

Back to the Futura

Optimize fonts with Astro Font 🔠

Inspired by Next.js Font Optimization, Rishi Raj Jain has released Astro Font — an awesome new package for optimizing fonts inside your Astro project.

Astro Font will automatically optimize both custom and local fonts, plus fonts over any CDN, leading to demonstrable improvements to Cumulative Layout Shift and other performance benefits.

Tunnel vision

Expose your local Astro server to the Internet 🚇

Another week, another new Astro Dev Toolbar app!

Astro Tunnel is an Astro Dev Toolbar App that enables your local Astro server to be accessible from the Internet. Internally, it uses Cloudflare's Quick Tunnels via unjs/untun, so no additional configuration is required to start tunneling.

To install Astro Tunnel, run the following command with your preferred package manager: 

npx astro add astro-tunnel

If you have something awesome you’d like to share with the Astro community, you can reach me at [email protected] or via DM on X

AstroXtra 💫

What’s happening on Twitter X this week…

Astro Showcase 🌠

Rated A for Astronomical

Our showcase this week extends beyond Astro and covers other frameworks such as… well, just about every single one!

Addy Osmani has shared an amazing movie app learning project built in seven different frameworks, including Astro, Next.js, and Svelte.

The project is the collective effort of multiple contributors, with the Astro app built by our friend Maxi Ferreira.

What’s on your watchlist for the holidays? 🍿

Other Astro projects in orbit 🪐

More great Astro projects worth checking out! ↓

Dummy API

A free Dummy API that helps you to build your application using mock JSON data. We provide multiple routes and data sets for you to work with.

dummyapi.online

AI assisted meal selection: A Viget Exploration

Leveraging AI assisted choices to make deciding what to eat a snap.

explorations.viget.com/ai-food

Would you like your work to be featured in our Astro Showcase? Get in touch at [email protected] or DM me on X

Beyond the Astrosphere 🪐

What caught my eye outside of Astro this week…

  • Heroicons Micro — almost three hundred new 16×16 icons designed for tighter, higher density UIs from the makers of Tailwind CSS

  • Proximity Glow Cards — a great CodePen demonstrating a rather magical glowing border effect using CSS and JavaScript

  • Codeium — a free alternative to GitHub Copilot

And that’s a wrap for 2023! Thank you so much for all your support this year. Enjoy the break, and hey, maybe finish that side project…

I’ll be back in your inboxes on Tuesday 9th January 2024.

In the meantime, you can contact me by email at [email protected] or drop into my DMs on X if you have something you’d like to share.

Don’t forget, you can also join the conversation with other Astro developers in the Astro Community on X.

Happy Holidays, Astronauts!

– Nathan 🧑‍🚀