About

What the heck is a ‘Stellar Howdy’?

Question: How does a Texan/American say hello to the world?

Answer: With a Stellar Howdy!

We wanted to devise a catchy and memorable name for our family blog and we came up with the name ‘Stellar Howdy’.

A Stellar Howdy is a greeting from the Kando Family’s newest addition. It’s a way to greet friends and family from across the Atlantic Ocean. It’s a way to say hello to the world!

What can you expect from this blog?

Family updates and photos, personal essays, and other random musings.

Also, I will try to include some customly crafted stlye and design elements to make this blog unique and fun to read.

For instance, the announcement letter uses linen paper and an engraved effect to give for the letterhead to emulate a real letter printed on cardstock.

Why a blog and not a Facebook page?

  1. We wanted to create a space where we could share our stories, photos, and videos with our family and friends, without the distractions of social media.
  2. We also wanted to create a space that was more permanent, where we could look back on our memories and milestones for years to come. This is site is where we’ll be sharing our journey with family and friends spread throughout the world.
  3. We understand how important it is to keep everyone in the loop, which is why we’ll be updating the blog regularly. So whether it’s a heartwarming family gathering, a delightful travel experience, or simply our everyday joys, you won’t miss a thing.

For the technically inclined - how is this blog built?

This blog is built using Astro JS, static site framework designed for speed. It’s a static site generator that uses React components and Markdown to generate static HTML pages.

The sites infrastructure is hosted on AWS using CloudFront, S3, and Route 53.

The site is adminsistered (content, deployments, and build artifacts) using a rudimentary self-built headless CMS.

My goal was to create something simple, fast, and easy to maintain. I wanted to avoid the complexity of a full-blown CMS like Wordpress and the like. I also wanted to avoid the complexity of a full-blown static site generator like Gatsby or NextJS.

Is it overkill? Probably. But I wanted to learn something new and I needed something to work on to keep busy in anticipation of our new arrival.