Rebuilding This Site in Astro

The site you’re looking at started life as a jQuery-templated WordPress theme: one real page, with About/Resume/Contact swapped in over an AJAX router using hash URLs. It worked, but it meant no shareable page URLs, no SEO for inner pages, and a pile of jQuery plugins doing work a modern framework gives you for free.

What stayed the same

• The black/blue curtain wipe on every navigation
• The floating close button on inner pages
• The GSAP-powered home intro animation
• The overall visual language — same fonts, same layout, same feel

What changed

• Real routes. /about, /resume, and /contact are now actual pages instead of AJAX fragments — shareable links, working browser back button, and search engines can actually index them.
• No client framework runtime. Pages ship as static HTML with small islands of vanilla TypeScript for the interactive bits — no React/Vue bundle weight for a resume site.
• Server-rendered skill bars. The resume page’s progress bars render from data at build time instead of being filled in by JavaScript after the page loads.

The trickiest part wasn’t the framework swap — it was making sure every small interaction detail (the exact timing of the curtain wipe, the close button’s slide-down entrance) survived the move from “AJAX overlay on a persistent page” to “real page, every time.”