Starting my NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day page. This is a small site that will pull NASA’s APOD API and show the day’s title, image or video, and explanation. For this session I decided to deploy-first and get a live (but nearly empty) page onto GitHub Pages before building any features.

Set up: the Vite scaffold, a .gitignore keeping my .env safe, .env.example, vite.config.js so Pages serves assets from the right path (otherwise 404s), and a GitHub Actions workflow that builds and publishes to Pages. First deploy actually failed on the Pages step because Pages wasn’t enabled yet. I enabled it, re-ran, green check, live page confirmed.

Next session: fetch and render the APOD data