Astro Weekly #78

Build smarter search with Algolia, level up your RSS and Atom feeds, all eyes on Astro after cryptic teaser

Author

Nathan Lawson
April 13, 2025

Hello, Astronauts!

The calm before the launch is here—but not for long.

Astro HQ has dropped a cryptic teaser hinting at something big coming Monday.

But while the main engines warm up, the community’s been busy shipping. From smart Algolia indexing to RSS feeds that play nice with MDX, this week’s builds are primed, polished and ready for launch.

Let’s get into it. 🚀

What’s new with Astro 🗞️

Astro blurs a logo, blows our minds

Astro teases something big for Monday 👀

The official Astro account dropped a cryptic teaser late Friday, featuring a blurred logo and the words “Prepare for launch”, with the simple caption: “See you Monday.”

No details, no context, just pure suspense.

What’s your guess? A new release? Major feature? Astro-branded space helmets?

We’ll be recapping everything in next week’s issue, so buckle up and stay tuned.

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Astro Community 🧑‍🚀

Let Astro do the heavy lifting

Building an Astro + Algolia integration from scratch 🔍

Thomas Ledoux walks through building a custom Astro integration that automatically parses and indexes site content to Algolia during the production build.

On the frontend, Thomas uses React InstantSearch to easily query the index and display fast, dynamic results.

Clean feeds from messy MDX with Astro

Building Better RSS/Atom feeds in Astro 📡

Frustrated by the limitations of Astro’s default RSS package with MDX content, George Song created a custom pipeline to convert MDX to clean, valid HTML.

The setup strips imports, handles custom elements, and ensures absolute URLs—resulting in robust, reader-friendly feeds that play nice with both RSS and Atom.

What else caught my interest this week 🤓

Check out these great posts from the Astro Community ↓

If you have something awesome you’d like to share with the Astro community, you can reach me at [email protected] or via DM on X

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Astro on X 💫

What’s happening on Twitter X this week…

Astro Showcase 🤩

Check out these impressive projects built with Astro!

Marie Curie | The UK’s leading end of life charity

Marie Curie is here for anyone with an illness they’re likely to die from, and those close to them. We are with you to the end.

mariecurie.org.uk

Studio Kogel

A Creative Studio. Devoted To Making Unique And Memorable Brands | Websites, Branding & Social Media.

studiokogel.com

That’s it for this week’s flight log. 🚀

As always, if you’re building something cool with Astro, send it my way at [email protected] or drop into my DMs on X.

Whatever’s on the horizon, you can bet we’ll break it down in next Sunday’s issue.

Catch you soon, Astronauts!

– Nathan 👨‍🚀