Building My Website - Extras (Part 10)

This article is part of a series about building my personal website:

1. The idea and choosing the right tool
2. SEO essentials: meta tags and base head element
3. Content management with Markdown and Frontmatter
4. Semantic HTML for accessibility and external readers
5. Minimalist CSS: styling and native-like design
6. Adding color themes with JavaScript
7. Astro plugins: RSS, Sitemap, Word count
8. SVG icons and Favicon
9. Building resume with XeLaTeX
10. Extras

robots.txt

robots.txt is a file in the project root that gives rules to web crawlers.

Here is mine:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /tags/

Sitemap: https://efimish.github.io/sitemap-index.xml

I excluded tag index pages from crawling because I don’t think they provide much value in search engine results.

humans.txt

humans.txt is a fun, optional file where you can credit yourself, the tools you used, or technologies involved.

For now, mine is short and simple:

Made by Efim Ishenin

QR codes

I got interested in how QR codes work and wanted to create one for my website. I wanted it to be perfect: correct error correction and one pixel per visible pixel.

I used a simple JavaScript tool to generate them:

bun x qrcode -q 1 -s 1 -o qr.png "https://efimish.github.io"
bun x qrcode -q 1 -s 1 -o qr.svg "https://efimish.github.io"

I haven’t used them anywhere yet, so I just put them in the public folder.

tsconfig.json

I added import aliases to avoid typing long relative paths:

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "baseUrl": ".",
    "paths": {
      "@assets/*": ["src/assets/*"],
      "@components/*": ["src/components/*"],
      "@layouts/*": ["src/layouts/*"],
      "@scripts/*": ["src/scripts/*"],
      "@styles/*": ["src/styles/*"]
    }
  }
}

GitHub Actions for deployment

To automatically deploy my website to GitHub Pages on every push to the main branch, I created this GitHub Actions workflow:

name: Deploy to GitHub Pages

on:
  push:
    branches: [ main ]
  workflow_dispatch:

permissions:
  contents: read
  pages: write
  id-token: write

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout your repository using git
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: Install, build, and upload your site
        uses: withastro/action@v3

  deploy:
    needs: build
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    environment:
      name: github-pages
      url: ${{ steps.deployment.outputs.page_url }}
    steps:
      - name: Deploy to GitHub Pages
        id: deployment
        uses: actions/deploy-pages@v4

This workflow installs dependencies, builds the site, and publishes it to GitHub Pages automatically.

Inspiration and References

While building my website, I drew inspiration from several blogs:

• Adam McKerlie
• Mark Horn
• CSS Tricks
• Hynek Svacha
• Charles Wang

Missed something?

If you have any questions left, feel free to check out the source code of my website on GitHub