Outer Reach

A static, bilingual (English / Italian) site built with Astro v6. It combines a digital garden of interlinked, evergreen notes, a blog, an EXIF-driven photos gallery, and standalone now / manifesto pages — with a light/dark theme. Output is fully static.

Live at outerreach.life.

Quick Start

Uses pnpm (version pinned in package.json).

pnpm install         # Install dependencies
pnpm dev             # Dev server at http://localhost:4321
pnpm build           # Build static site to ./dist/
pnpm preview         # Preview the production build
pnpm astro check     # Type-check (strict TypeScript)

There is no test suite; pnpm astro check is the correctness gate. Run pnpm build after content or routing changes — backlinks, the note graph, and photo EXIF all resolve at build time.

Project Structure

src/
├── content/
│   ├── garden/{en,it}/      # Garden notes (.md / .mdx), one file per locale
│   ├── blog/{en,it}/        # Blog posts
│   ├── now/{en,it}.md       # "Now" page content
│   └── manifesto/{en,it}.md # Manifesto content
├── content.config.ts        # Content Collection schemas (garden, blog)
├── i18n/
│   ├── ui.ts                # All UI strings (en + it)
│   └── utils.ts             # Translation + locale-path helpers
├── lib/
│   ├── garden.ts            # Backlinks, related notes, note graph
│   ├── blog.ts              # Post fetching / sorting
│   └── photos.ts            # EXIF extraction from public/photos
├── plugins/
│   └── remarkWikiLinks.ts   # Renders [[wiki-links]] in note bodies
├── layouts/                 # BaseLayout, BlogPostLayout, GardenNoteLayout
├── components/              # TopNav, Footer, LanguageSwitcher, Backlinks, …
├── pages/                   # English routes (Italian mirror under pages/it/)
└── styles/                  # Per-page CSS
public/photos/               # Drop .jpg/.jpeg here to add to the gallery

Internationalisation

Two locales are configured in astro.config.mjs: en (default, no URL prefix) and it (served under /it/).

• Routes are mirrored: English under src/pages/, Italian under src/pages/it/.
• Content is split by directory (garden/en/, garden/it/, …); add a note in both locales to have it in both.
• UI strings live in src/i18n/ui.ts under ui.en and ui.it. The en set must be complete; other locales fall back to en per key.

Content

Garden notes — src/content/garden/{locale}/

---
title: "Degrowth"
description: "A short summary used in listings and meta tags"
tags: ["economics", "ecology"]   # optional
status: growing                  # seed | growing | evergreen | experimental (default: seed)
created: 2026-01-15
updated: 2026-02-01              # optional
author: "Your Name"              # optional
draft: false                     # optional, hides from listings when true
---

Note body. Link to other notes with [[other-note-slug]]
or [[other-note-slug|Custom display text]].

Notes grow through statuses (seed → growing → evergreen, plus experimental). [[wiki-links]] connect notes; the site computes backlinks, related notes (by shared tags), and a note graph (/garden/graph.json) at build time.

Blog posts — src/content/blog/{locale}/

Same frontmatter as garden notes, except the date field is published (not created) and there is no status:

---
title: "January Roundup"
description: "Monthly dispatch"
tags: ["roundup"]   # optional
published: 2026-01-31
updated: 2026-02-02 # optional
author: "Your Name" # optional
draft: false        # optional
---

Photos — public/photos/

Drop .jpg / .jpeg files into public/photos/. Camera, lens, exposure, and date are read from EXIF at build time, and photos are sorted newest-first. The filename (without extension) becomes the slug.

Now / Manifesto

src/content/now/{locale}.md and src/content/manifesto/{locale}.md are plain markdown files (not collections), rendered by their respective pages.

The canonical schema is src/content.config.ts — consult it if frontmatter validation fails.

Theme

Light/dark theme with OS-preference detection and a toggle (top-right). The choice persists in localStorage and is applied via a data-theme attribute. Colours are CSS variables defined in src/layouts/BaseLayout.astro.

Configuration

Key settings in astro.config.mjs:

• site — production domain (https://www.outerreach.life); RSS and sitemap depend on it.
• i18n — locales and routing.
• fonts — local variable font (Roboto Serif) from src/assets/fonts/.
• markdown.remarkPlugins — includes the wiki-links plugin.

Deployment

Run pnpm build and deploy the dist/ folder to any static host (Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages, GitHub Pages, etc.). After deploying, verify /rss.xml, /it/rss.xml, and /sitemap-index.xml are reachable.

Resources

• Astro Documentation
• Content Collections
• Astro i18n
• RSS Integration