David Krug — essays, linkblog, notes, and books. A vintage-style personal weblog in the tradition of the old web.https://davidkrug.org/enhttps://davidkrug.org/posts/a-cup-from-mount-apo/https://davidkrug.org/posts/a-cup-from-mount-apo/Today's coffee comes from Mount Apo. My daily coffee routine varies. Depends on how much time I have or what I'm working on. This afternoon it called for another cup of coffee and I thought I'd make it a bit special. Sun, 17 May 2026 05:27:00 GMTThe beans come from [Mount Apo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Apo). They are grown high up where the air is thinner and the days move slower. They are roasted recently, still carrying the memory of heat and smoke, but not long enough for anything to dull. When you open the bag there is a quiet smell—earth, cocoa, something almost like wood after rain. The grinder sits on the counter. Manual. No sound of machines. Just the steady turn of the handle and the resistance of the beans breaking down. It takes a minute or two. Not more. The work is simple, but it asks for attention. By the time it is done, the coffee is no longer a product. It is something that has been handled. Water is filtered. Clean, cold at first, then heated until just before boiling. There is a point where water changes, where it stops being storage and becomes movement. That is when it is ready. The pour-over begins slowly. A small bloom first, the coffee swelling and releasing gas, like it is waking up. Then a steady pour in circles. Not rushed. Not perfect either. The water finds its own path through the grounds, taking what it can, leaving what it should. It drips into the cup below. Dark at first. Then clearer. The smell rises and fills the room. It is not sharp. It is steady. The first sip is hot. It carries weight without bitterness. There is something clean in it, something direct. No sugar needed. No milk. Just the work of the bean, the mountain, the water, and the hand that brought them together. It does not last long. A cup like this never does. But it stays with you in a way that makes the next hour quieter than it would have been otherwise. Notesdk@701am.com (David Krug)https://davidkrug.org/posts/astro-rocket--a-theme-that-already-feels-like-a-finished-product/https://davidkrug.org/posts/astro-rocket--a-theme-that-already-feels-like-a-finished-product/Astro Rocket isn’t really a “starter theme” in the traditional sense. It behaves more like a fully designed website that just happens to be open source. Built on Astro 6 and Tailwind, it ships with dozens of components, multiple visual themes, and a level of completeness that removes most of the usual “now I need to design everything” step from the process.Sun, 17 May 2026 04:46:00 GMT### A production-grade Astro starter with an almost suspicious amount of polish Astro Rocket isn’t really a “starter theme” in the traditional sense. It behaves more like a fully designed website that just happens to be open source. Built on Astro 6 and Tailwind, it ships with dozens of components, multiple visual themes, and a level of completeness that removes most of the usual “now I need to design everything” step from the process. ## It already looks like something you’d ship to a client Most themes give you scaffolding. Astro Rocket gives you opinionated decisions: typography, spacing, motion, layout hierarchy, color systems. It comes with 57+ components and 12 built-in color themes that can be switched live in the UI without rebuilding anything. There’s a kind of quiet intensity in that approach. It assumes you don’t want to spend three days arguing with buttons or figuring out what a “hero section” should look like. The hero section is already there. It already animates. It already works. ## Everything is tuned for “this feels fast” Under the surface, it leans hard into Astro’s static-first philosophy. Most pages ship as HTML, with JavaScript only appearing where it’s absolutely necessary—theme switching, forms, interactive effects. Everything else stays inert, fast, and close to instant. That matters more than it sounds like it should. The experience isn’t just “fast in benchmarks,” it feels immediate in the way static sites used to feel before everything became a JavaScript ecosystem. Even the animations are designed around restraint: subtle spring curves, staggered reveals, scroll indicators that don’t compete for attention. It’s motion as punctuation, not decoration. ## SEO, i18n, and blog systems aren’t add-ons There’s a full blog system built on Astro’s content collections, complete with schemas, authors, tags, RSS, and structured metadata for search engines. SEO isn’t treated as a plugin or afterthought. It’s wired into the foundation—JSON-LD schemas, Open Graph tags, sitemap generation, canonical handling. The kind of setup most projects retrofit months later is already in place from day one. Internationalization is also supported at the structure level, not bolted on via routing hacks. ## The real idea behind Astro Rocket The interesting part isn’t the feature list. It’s the philosophy embedded in it. Astro Rocket is built on the assumption that most “starter themes” still require too much starting. That you shouldn’t need to assemble a design system just to publish a portfolio or marketing site. That a theme should feel closer to a finished artifact than a starting point. It’s less scaffolding, more preset reality. And depending on how you build, that either removes friction—or removes excuses. Linkblogdk@701am.com (David Krug)https://davidkrug.org/posts/701am-com-build-using-astro/https://davidkrug.org/posts/701am-com-build-using-astro/I built my new companies website using Astro and Decap with a custom theme. Sun, 17 May 2026 04:38:00 GMTThe company website was developed using a modern, performance-focused stack centered on Astro and Decap CMS, paired with a fully custom theme tailored to the brand’s identity and content strategy. Astro provides the structural foundation, enabling ultra-fast load times through its static-first architecture and selective hydration approach. This ensures the site remains lightweight while still supporting dynamic, interactive components where needed. The result is a clean, high-performance experience optimized for both users and search engines. Decap CMS was integrated to give the team a flexible, Git-based content management system without sacrificing developer control. It allows content to be edited through a simple interface while still keeping everything version-controlled and tightly aligned with the codebase. On top of this stack, a custom theme was designed and built from the ground up. Rather than relying on prebuilt templates, the design system was intentionally crafted to reflect the brand’s tone, visual identity, and long-term scalability needs. This includes reusable components, consistent typography rules, and a modular layout system that makes future expansion straightforward. The combination of Astro, Decap CMS, and a bespoke theme results in a website that is fast, maintainable, and built for growth—balancing developer flexibility with a streamlined content workflow. Linkblogdk@701am.com (David Krug)https://davidkrug.org/posts/return-of-the-personal-website/https://davidkrug.org/posts/return-of-the-personal-website/For a decade we outsourced our writing to platforms with better distribution and worse manners. That bargain is quietly coming undone.Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT For roughly a decade, the personal website was a thing we tolerated rather than loved — a static résumé, a portfolio with a contact form, a place that mostly pointed elsewhere. The actual *writing*, the part with a voice and a point of view, happened on platforms with better distribution and worse manners. That bargain is quietly coming undone, and the reasons are stranger than the usual story about algorithms. I have been keeping a list. Not a thorough one — just names of people I used to follow on the big networks and now find, instead, at quiet URLs of their own. The list is now long enough that I no longer think it's an accident. ## What changed, exactly The conventional explanation is some combination of algorithmic decay, platform rot, and the slow realization that renting an audience is a bad deal. All of which is true. But it misses something subtler, which is that the act of writing for an algorithm is itself *tiring* in a way that writing for a page is not. > A website is a room. A feed is a hallway. You can decorate a room. You cannot decorate a hallway. > — overheard, somewhere on Mastodon ### The small-tool renaissance Static site generators are part of it, but they are not the whole story. The whole story is that the tooling — Astro, Eleventy, Hugo, even a well-loved Jekyll — has finally caught up with the idea. You can stand up a site in an afternoon and edit it with a CMS that doesn't try to own you. ```bash npm create astro@latest my-website ``` That is, no kidding, the entire installation step. Five years ago this would have required Webpack, three plugins, and an afternoon of yak-shaving. --- I am not going to pretend this is a movement. It is closer to a quiet migration — the kind where you notice, one Sunday, that half the people you used to read on the platform are gone, and they did not announce it, and the writing they are doing now is better. Essaysdk@701am.com (David Krug)https://davidkrug.org/posts/disappearing-typefaces-1970s/https://davidkrug.org/posts/disappearing-typefaces-1970s/Lovely visual essay from Letterform Archive on the photo-typesetting era — a narrow twenty-year window when type was made of light instead of metal or pixels.Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT A lovely visual essay from Letterform Archive on the photo-typesetting era — a narrow twenty-year window when type was made of light instead of metal or pixels. The kerning was awful and the optical sizes were perfect. What's striking, looking back, is how much character was preserved by the constraints. The film masters had to commit to a small set of optical sizes, and the shift to digital flattened all of that into one drawing scaled mathematically. Variable fonts are finally bringing some of it back. Linkblogdk@701am.com (David Krug)https://davidkrug.org/posts/three-small-tools/https://davidkrug.org/posts/three-small-tools/None of these are productivity hacks, and I'm slightly embarrassed by how much I use them — a clipboard manager, a Markdown scratchpad, and a weather widget from 2004.Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT None of these are productivity hacks, and I'm slightly embarrassed by how much I use them. A single-keystroke clipboard manager. A Markdown scratchpad that never gets saved. And a weather widget so plain it could have been built in 2004 — which, in fact, it was. ## 1. Maccy Maccy is a clipboard history app for macOS. It is exactly what it sounds like and nothing else. ⌘⇧V pops up the last fifty things I've copied. I use it dozens of times a day and I forget it exists. ## 2. A Markdown scratchpad I keep a single untitled Markdown file open in iA Writer at all times. I don't save it, I don't name it, and I don't try to organize it. It is the closest thing I have to thinking with my hands. ## 3. A weather widget from 2004 There is a weather site called Forecast Advisor that hasn't been redesigned since the mid-2000s. It looks like it was built in FrontPage. It is also more accurate than any weather app I've ever used. I bookmark it on every new device. --- The pattern I notice in all three: they do one thing, they don't try to be a platform, and they don't ask for my attention when I'm not using them. I would not be the first person to point out that this used to be how all software worked. Notesdk@701am.com (David Krug)