Hello, world: how this site was built

First post on the new site. Since I just finished building it, here is the whole story — including why I chose this stack and what tripped me up.

Why static

My requirements were modest:

• Show my work and my writing
• Load fast on phones
• No server bill, no database to maintain

A static site covers all three. Every page is already a finished HTML file at build time, so a visit is just a file download. No database, no backend process — and nothing that can fall over at 3 a.m.

The stack

• Build: a few dozen lines of Node that turn Markdown into HTML, with zero third-party dependencies
• Hosting: Cloudflare Pages — free, global CDN, automatic HTTPS
• Comments: Giscus on top of GitHub Discussions, so there is no comment backend to write
• Domain: pointed straight at Pages, with DNS already on Cloudflare

The smallest possible example

The core of the build is roughly this:

const html = renderMarkdown(markdown);
await writeFile("dist/index.html", wrap(html), "utf8");

That is it. No bundler, no dependency tree. Run node build.mjs and the site exists.

Takeaway

Fewer tools means fewer things that break. This site has exactly three concepts: content (Markdown), templates (a few JS files) and build (one script).

Next up: why a bilingual site is worth the trouble, and how to keep two languages from fighting each other.