Overview
Knitted Story Bears is a blog of free amigurumi crochet patterns — little animals, dolls and seasonal ornaments, with step-by-step photos for every round. It used to run on Blogger; I rebuilt it as a static site that is faster, easier to follow while crocheting, and fully under my control.
There are no ads, analytics or tracking, and the whole site runs on my own server.
What I built
- Astro static site, with each pattern written as a Markdown file in a content collection
- Pattern pages made for crocheting: tap a round to tick it off (progress is saved in the browser), a "Jump to a part" menu, a print-friendly layout and a Pin it button
- Collections, related patterns, a stitch guide and structured data for search engines
- Node.js import script that moved every Blogger post, photo and comment into the new site, dropping link spam on the way
- Permanent redirects from every old Blogger address, so search rankings and Pinterest pins keep working
- Build-time photo processing with sharp: step photos grouped into grids and lazy-loaded without the page jumping
- Self-hosted Remark42 comments in a locked-down Docker container — readers comment with just a name, no accounts
- Served by Caddy with automatic HTTPS and no access logs