Writing on Astro, web design, performance, and the decisions behind the work.
Why Astro is the only web framework I reach for. What it is, how it works, and why it quietly changed how I think about building fast, calm, well-made websites.
Hans Martens — Astro developer & web designer in Veghel. From Windows 3.1 to building Astro sites with Claude. The longer story.
How I built a passwordless client portal with Astro, Moneybird and Resend — magic-link sign-in, live invoices, PDF downloads, and no database anywhere.
As a freelance Astro developer, I built a brand-coloured, pure-CSS tech-stack marquee for my homepage hero and About page — and shipped the same component in my Astro Rocket theme.
Astro vs WordPress, compared honestly — performance, security, maintenance, editing, and cost. When a fresh Astro build wins, and when a CMS is still the right call.
Why Claude Code — running on Opus 4.8 — has become the coding partner I reach for on every Astro build. What it is, how I actually use it, and where it earns its keep.
Core Web Vitals explained in 2026 — what LCP, INP, and CLS measure, the thresholds Google uses, and how I improve Core Web Vitals on every Astro build.
A plain-language guide to the Google Lighthouse report: what the four scores measure, how to run one yourself, and what 100/100/100/100 says about hansmartens.dev and astrorocket.dev.
How Astro Rocket's opt-in i18n works end to end — locale routing, the t() helper, an auto-localized blog, projects, and navigation — and the exact steps to ship a multilingual site.
Astro Rocket's blog comments are now pluggable: pick Giscus (GitHub Discussions) or the self-hostable, privacy-friendly Cusdis. Both lazy-load on scroll — skip them and you pay nothing.
Astro Rocket now lets you configure the footer menu independently of the header navigation. Add a Privacy link, an Imprint, or a Cookie Policy without cluttering your main nav.
Astro Rocket renders an optional TOC on blog posts in three layouts — inline card, sticky sidebar, or both — with the sidebar on the left or right. Pick what fits your audience.
A 3-state colour-mode system with no flash, live OS-preference tracking, and a pill dropdown that respects what the user actually picked. Here is how it is built.
A step-by-step guide to dropping a brand-tinted LetterGlitch canvas effect into an Astro 7 project — with the full component, an Astro wrapper, and the small details that make it production-ready.