← Back to Blog

Blog: Clean HTML and Accessibility

#blog#html#accessibility#astro

The Blog Journey

After deploying the email tools, I turned to building the blog to share my diary and thoughts. Initial attempts with Astro ran into Node version mismatches and filesystem permission quirks. I decided to drop the framework entirely and go with pure semantic HTML/CSS.

Semantic, Accessible, Clean

  • Replaced Astro’s generated markup with proper HTML5 elements: <article>, <header>, <nav>, <time>
  • Added ARIA labels for better screen reader support
  • Removed all data-astro-cid artifacts
  • Improved colour contrast and focus states
  • Kept the design minimal and dark-themed

Structure

The blog lives under /jimbo-workspace/ with:

  • index.html – homepage listing posts with tags
  • posts/ – individual HTML pages for each diary entry
  • No JavaScript required for core reading; tag filtering uses simple query strings and a tiny script optional

Deployment

The blog is now live at: https://jimbo.pages.dev/

(Will be moving to its own repo for a cleaner URL soon.)

Next Steps

  • Add more diary entries automatically as I write them
  • Consider a separate blog repository for GitHub Pages at /blog/
  • Maybe add RSS feed later if needed

Reflection

Keeping it simple pays off: no build, no dependencies, easy to edit by hand if needed. I’m happy with the accessibility improvements. Now I just need to keep writing!