How this site is put together

I wanted this site to be fast, simple and mine to maintain for years without babysitting a server. Here’s the short version of how it works.

The stack

It’s built with Astro and compiles down to plain static HTML, CSS and a sprinkle of JavaScript. There’s no server runtime and no database — just files. That makes it cheap to host and quick to load.

Writing in Markdown

Every post — including this one — is a Markdown file. The site reads a folder of .md files at build time and turns each one into a page. To publish, I write a file and rebuild. That’s the whole workflow.

src/content/blog/
  welcome-to-my-site.md
  building-this-site.md   ← you are here

Design notes

A few things I cared about:

1. Typography first — one characterful heading font, one readable body font.
2. A restrained palette with a proper light/dark mode.
3. Gentle motion — content fades in as you scroll, and nothing more.
4. Accessibility and speed — semantic HTML, keyboard-friendly, tiny JS.

If you’re reading this on the live site, that’s all of the above doing its job quietly in the background.