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- Astro Weekly #55
Astro Weekly #55
Introducing PandaBox, a lightbox gallery for your Astro projects, dark mode-compatible technical diagrams in Astro with Excalidraw
Nathan Lawson
November 03, 2024
Greetings, Astronauts.
As we look forward to the anticipated release of Astro 5.0 in December, we kick off November with a week that allows us to prepare for exciting developments ahead!
In today’s newsletter, we have a recap of October’s highlights, an innovative lightbox and gallery tool to enhance your Astro projects, plus a practical guide for creating technical diagrams that adapt smoothly to both light and dark modes.
Let’s take a look!
What’s new with Astro 🗞️
What’s new with you?
Updates from Mission Control 🛰️
As we patiently await further updates on Astro 5.0, why not check out the What's new in Astro - October 2024 recap from Astro Docs Lead, Sarah Rainsberger.
It’s like Astro Weekly, but monthly.
October highlights include:
✨ Astro 4.16
🏠 State of Frontend 2024
🎤 ViteConf 2024
☁️ Astro Cloudinary SDK
Astro Boosters 🚀
High-performance image and video delivery
You've heard it before, "Generative AI is going to change the world!" However, it's often just a moderate improvement to the same LLM. But what practical AI-based tools are available that we can use right now in our projects?
Cloudinary's Generative AI and Content Analysis features help improve your image and video workflows with reliable tools like easily replacing the background of an image or generating alt text based on what's inside of your image that you can use now, at scale, with Cloudinary.
Get a BONUS 3 CREDITS on your free Cloudinary account:
cld.media/astroweeklydevs
Astro Community 🧑🚀
Let there be dark diagrams
Dark Mode-Compatible Technical Diagrams in Astro 🌚
Alexander Opalic’s detailed guide walks you through seamlessly integrating Excalidraw diagrams inside Astro, with automatic dark and light mode adaptation.
This approach tackles challenges like fixed colors in exported SVGs, enabling dynamic theme-aware visuals without maintaining separate versions for each mode.
PandaBox makes light work of lightboxes
Introducing PandaBox 🐼
PandaBox is a lightbox and gallery tool built specifically for Astro.
It’s dependency-free, touch-enabled, and customizable, allowing users to set slide transitions, add alt text, and use Astro’s content image component for performance.
What else I’ve been reading this week 🤓
Check out these great posts from the Astro Community ↓
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
Instantly add file uploads to your app with Pinata’s API
Pinata’s File API lets developers integrate file uploads and retrieval in just minutes. No complex setup, no configuration headaches—just fast and scalable file management.
Astro on X 💫
What’s happening on Twitter X this week…
Stayed up late tonight shipping v1 of a web project for a friend!
From zero to deployed in a few hours--including getting feedback in the middle.
@astrodotbuild is incredibly useful. Dead-simple for small projects, yet also powerful for larger ones.
— Scott Scharl (@scott_scharl)
5:47 AM • Nov 2, 2024
Direct link for web version:
https://x.com/scott_scharl/status/1852588407823769795
Astro Showcase 🤩
Check out these impressive projects built with Astro!
Would you like your work to be featured in our Astro Showcase? Get in touch at [email protected] or DM me on X
That’s a wrap for this week inside the Astroverse.
If you’d like to contribute to Astro Weekly, feel free to reach out to [email protected] or via DM on X.
Have a great week, Astronauts!
– Nathan 👨🚀