Shipping a Minimal Blog in an Afternoon
Notes on the stack and the decisions behind this site — and why keeping it boring was the point.
Every personal site project dies the same death: a framework evaluation spreadsheet, three half-finished rewrites, and a domain that forwards to nothing. This time the rule was simple — boring technology, done in an afternoon.
The stack
- Astro for static generation. Components where convenient, zero client-side framework by default.
- Markdown + content collections for posts, with a schema so typos in frontmatter fail the build instead of the page.
- One CSS file for the design system. Custom properties for color, spacing and type. No preprocessor, no utility framework.
- System fonts. They load instantly and nobody has ever complained about them.
What I deliberately skipped
Analytics, comments, a newsletter, and a dark mode with five interpolation steps between themes. All of those can be added later — the point was to remove every excuse not to publish the first post.
// The entire content pipeline
const posts = (await getCollection('blog'))
.filter((post) => !post.data.draft)
.sort((a, b) => b.data.pubDate.valueOf() - a.data.pubDate.valueOf());If you are stuck in the same loop: pick the boring stack, ship one page, and write the second post before redesigning anything.