At the suggestion of Noted Luminary @Nimgimli, who left a post on the original site where I’ve been duping my posts (or here, if you’re reading it on the WordPress site), I checked out emDash, a Typescript re-imagining of WordPress. While I was pretty impressed with the direction the project is moving in, it’s still a beta product and is missing a lot of features that I think I’m taking for granted with WordPress. Since the project aims to recreate WordPress, they offer a nice plugin that can be uploaded to my WP site to facilitate the transfer of content from WP to emDash. It worked really well! Except for the fact that it renamed all of my images and updated the links in the posts, so the only way for me to identify which images are which and belong to which post is to slog through each post and note the name of the image file.

That got me thinking about how I might extend my Astro blog project. My first stop was to revisit TinaCMS. One of the Astro theme packages I had looked at came with Tina bundled in, but after investigating the project I got confused — Tina requires Node, and I thought “well, GitHub Pages can’t do Node, so that won’t work!” and then I realized that I don’t need it running on the site; I need it running locally, where the posts are written.

That realization drove me to recall Front Matter CMS, a plugin for Visual Studio Code which is designed for platforms like Astro which use MD/MDX for content authoring. I’ve had to wire it into the project, so I guess I’m currently committed, although I made a backup of the site before I did it. Stupidly, I should have just made a branch in the repo for testing, but it’s 8AM on a Saturday as I write this, so I’m not entirely awake.

https://scopique.github.io/scopique_blog/posts/2026/05/23/helping-hands