Growing Galaxy

Growing Galaxy is a curated digital garden, photography exhibition, and field journal built as an Astro template with a minimalist aesthetic, combining a blog, photo albums, route journals, and a projects showcase.

What is Growing Galaxy?

Growing Galaxy is a static site template for Astro 7.4 that turns Markdown and MDX content into a personal digital exhibition space. It accepts blog posts, photo albums, trace entries (route journals), and project entries as input and outputs a pre-rendered static site with a photography gallery, an interactive Leaflet map explorer, dual search, and MCP integration. The repository metadata lists it as an MIT-licensed project with topics astro, blog, react, and tailwindcss.

Key Features

• Dual viewing modes for photography — albums render in a compact 16:10 catalog and can be explored in Stage mode (cinematic spotlight with centered filmstrip) or Wall mode (masonry grid), with a fullscreen lightbox mounted via React Portal and adaptive light/dark backdrops.
• Traces Explorer — an interactive cartographic field journal powered by Leaflet and React-Leaflet, recording coordinates, route tracking, and environmental baseline data.
• Dual search architecture — client-side full-text search via Pagefind plus AI semantic vector search through Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Cloudflare Vectorize.
• MCP integration — AI agents such as Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code, and Claude Desktop can semantically index and query site content; embeddings are generated offline during build using @huggingface/transformers with the BGE Small model (1024 dimensions, cosine metric).
• Modern stack — Astro 7.4 for zero-JS-by-default static rendering, React 19.3 client islands, Tailwind CSS 4 with custom @theme tokens, TypeScript, and Motion 14 for animations.
• Content types — MDX blog posts, Markdown photo albums organized by year, trace entries with frontmatter for dates and baseline data, and project entries with URL and GitHub links.
• Design system — airy glassmorphism (backdrop-blur and translucent surfaces), generous whitespace, a warm sand light palette and matte carbon black dark palette, Playfair Display serif accents paired with Inter sans-serif and technical monospace markers.
• SEO and feeds — schema.org JSON-LD, sitemaps, and RSS feed generated via BaseHead.astro.
• MDX and KaTeX support — mathematical notation and rich interactive components inside content.

Who is it for?

• Photographers — publish curated photo albums with year-based organization and present them in Stage or Wall viewing modes.
• Writers and bloggers — maintain an MDX blog with KaTeX math support and a client-side Pagefind search experience.
• Field journalers and travelers — log routes and observations as trace entries rendered on an interactive Leaflet map with coordinates and environmental baselines.
• AI tool users — expose site content to Claude Code, Cursor, or Windsurf through the built-in MCP server and Cloudflare Vectorize index.

Use cases

• Travel documentation: record trip routes, dates, and environmental notes in trace entries and explore them on a Leaflet map.
• Photo exhibition: organize photo albums by year and present them in a cinematic Stage view or a masonry Wall grid.
• Semantic content search: build offline BGE-small embeddings and sync them to Cloudflare Vectorize so AI agents can query the site via MCP.
• Automated deployment: push to main and let the provided GitHub Actions workflow build the Astro site, run Pagefind indexing, generate embeddings, sync vectors, and deploy to Cloudflare Edge.

How does Growing Galaxy work?

Content is authored as Markdown or MDX files inside src/content/ under blog/, photos/, traces/, or projects/, each with YAML frontmatter. Running pnpm run dev starts a local server at localhost:4321; pnpm run build produces the static site and the Pagefind search index; pnpm run build_index generates offline embeddings for the MCP vector store. Deployment uses the CI/CD pipeline in .github/workflows/deploy.yml, which requires CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN and CLOUDFLARE_ACCOUNT_ID secrets.

FAQ

Is Growing Galaxy free?

Yes. The repository is released under the MIT license, so the template can be used, modified, and redistributed under those terms.

What framework does Growing Galaxy use?

Growing Galaxy is built on Astro 7.4 with React 19.3 client islands, Tailwind CSS 4, and Motion 14, producing a static site with zero JavaScript by default.

How does the MCP search work?

Embeddings are generated offline during build with the BGE Small model via @huggingface/transformers, stored in a Cloudflare Vectorize index created with 1024 dimensions and cosine metric, and queried through a Cloudflare Worker MCP API layer.

Does Growing Galaxy include a photography gallery?

Yes. Photo albums are Markdown files organized by year under src/content/photos/, rendered with Stage and Wall viewing modes and a fullscreen lightbox.