merox-erudite: A Customized Astro Theme

I started this blog on astro-erudite — a clean, minimal template. Over several months I kept adding things: comments, analytics, schema markup, a homepage that actually said something about me. At some point the diff was large enough that keeping it as silent local patches didn’t make sense anymore, so I published it as a fork: merox-erudite.

Most of this was built with Claude Code and Cursor. I gave it well-defined prompts, reviewed everything, kept pushing until it was clean with no workarounds. I’m a sysadmin, not a web developer — this was a genuine experiment in how far you can get with AI tooling when you know what you want but don’t know the framework well.

meroxdotdev/merox-eruditeon GitHub

The reason for a fork rather than contributing back: some features (AdSense) don’t fit the original theme’s minimal philosophy, and the scope of changes is too personal to be a reasonable upstream PR. astro-erudite stays minimal; merox-erudite is batteries-included.

What I added

Giscus comments — GitHub Discussions, lazy-loaded, surviving Astro view transitions, following the theme. Unconfigured, the component doesn’t render at all. Needs a public repo with Discussions enabled.

Analytics — Google Analytics and Umami, both off unless the env vars exist:

PUBLIC_GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_ID=G-XXXXXXXXXX
PUBLIC_UMAMI_WEBSITE_ID=your-umami-id

SEO schemas — reusable FAQ and HowTo components for structured data.

Homepage — experience timeline, skills badges, a hero that says something. The timeline is data, configured in src/pages/index.astro:

const experience: ExperienceItem[] = [
  {
    role: 'Your Role',
    company: 'Company Name',
    period: '2020 - Present',
    current: true,
    icon: 'lucide:briefcase',
    key: 'Your achievements and responsibilities'
  },
]

Design — Geist variable fonts, better contrast in dark mode, visible focus rings for keyboard navigation.

Against the original

Feature	astro-erudite v1	merox-erudite
Comments	—	Giscus (GitHub Discussions)
Analytics	—	Google Analytics and Umami
SEO schemas	Basic	FAQ and HowTo
Homepage	Standard	Experience timeline, skills
Fonts	System	Geist variable fonts
AdSense	—	Built-in component

Getting started

Click “Use this template” on the merox-erudite repository

Clone and install:

git clone https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME/YOUR_REPO_NAME.git
cd YOUR_REPO_NAME
npm install

Start dev server:
```
npm run dev
```
Available at http://localhost:1234
Update src/consts.ts with your site info
Configure optional features via environment variables

For the original theme’s architecture and design documentation, see the astro-erudite repository by @jktrn.

Deploying it

I deployed it on Cloudflare Pages: free tier, global CDN, deploys on push, and environment variables you can edit without a CLI.

Astro is auto-detected, but if it isn’t:

Build command: npm run build
Output directory: dist
Node version: 20.x+

Environment variables go in Cloudflare Dashboard → Settings → Environment Variables. They’re read at build time, so a change here needs a redeploy to take effect:

PUBLIC_GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_ID=G-XXXXXXXXXX
PUBLIC_UMAMI_WEBSITE_ID=your-umami-id

PUBLIC_GISCUS_REPO=username/repo
PUBLIC_GISCUS_REPO_ID=your-repo-id
PUBLIC_GISCUS_CATEGORY=Blog Comments
PUBLIC_GISCUS_CATEGORY_ID=your-category-id

What I’d tell anyone considering the same fork: the moment your changes stop being patches and start being a philosophy the upstream doesn’t share, fork it. AdSense was never going to land in a theme whose whole point is minimalism, and pretending otherwise just meant carrying an unmergeable diff in silence.

References

astro-erudite by @jktrn — original design and architecture
Astro Micro by trevortylerlee — inspiration
Cursor — development tool