Ending My Vinyl Buying Anxiety (pt III)

A brave new world and new URL records.manhart.io.

Issues with using Astro

Astro is awesome for content sites (like this site), but this project outgrew Astro pretty quickly and was giving me headaches.

I figured out Astro had its limits pretty fast while building out the search component. I’m not certain what I’ve built now is the perfect solution, and honestly, it feels like cracking a walnut with an atomic bomb. But hey, let’s fucking crack it.

The biggest pain points I had with using Astro were around controlling state, building the search, and filtering. With Astro, each component lives in its own little world. This made sharing data between them tedious. It felt like I was cobbling together weird solutions just to get simple things to work.

So I rebuilt it and planned for a happier future because who knows what this little project will morph into.

React and Vite to the rescue

With React and Vite, I get a single runtime, a solid structure for filtering, and a smoother search experience for me and hopefully anyone using it. It’s also way less of a headache than juggling Astro’s hydration rules. Building this actually feels fun instead of a battle.

Why the subdomain?

Because why not. And honestly, I didn’t want to pay for another domain either. Also, records.manhart.io just felt good.

Enough rambling — go check out the new record collection site at records.manhart.io. And yes, that Barbra Streisand record slaps… don’t hate.

Part IV will dig into charts, filters, and maybe a few data viz experiments — stay tuned.