natewilson.co

A personal site for documenting projects and writing. I wanted somewhere to put stuff without it feeling like a LinkedIn extension.

Why

I never really wanted a personal website. But I like having a place to write that I own, and it's useful to have project documentation somewhere other than GitHub READMEs.

Tech

SvelteKit with markdown content. I've been learning Svelte through work and side projects, so this was an excuse to get more comfortable with it. I'm primarily a backend developer, so the frontend stuff is still new to me.

Blog posts and projects are markdown files with frontmatter. I built a custom renderer that handles images, code blocks, and syntax highlighting. Probably overkill for what I need, but once I started I just kept going.

The SSR migration

Originally I had everything loading client-side. Worked fine for browsing, but search engines and LLMs were only seeing "Loading..." placeholders. Had to convert the whole thing to server-side rendering with prerendering.

The fix: +page.server.ts files that read markdown at build time, adapter-static instead of adapter-auto, and replacing all the onMount() data fetching with server-side data. Now pages load with content already rendered.