alanchan.dev
This site: a server-rendered portfolio and blog on Astro and EmDash, hosted on Cloudflare Workers.
- 2026
- Design and engineering
- Astro, EmDash, Cloudflare Workers, D1, R2
A personal site should be quick to read and cheap to keep alive. This one is server-rendered by Astro inside a Cloudflare Worker, with content stored in D1 and media in R2, and edited through the EmDash admin.
Design
The palette is five cool greys with one fog blue accent. A single pane of frosted glass stays fixed behind every page, with a swarm of tiny particles drifting behind it. One grotesk handles display and reading, with a monospace for code and dates. Everything else is space.
Motion
The swarm tells the story of the home page: it opens as ribbons of fine fibers that twist and roll as you scroll, snaps into a lattice, settles into rows and closes into a ring, and it parts around the cursor. It is one canvas and one animation loop. Scrolling is smoothed with Lenis, and everything stands still when the visitor prefers reduced motion.
Content
Posts and projects are Portable Text. Code blocks are highlighted on the server with Shiki, so the page ships colour as plain HTML and CSS variables.