I’ve had some version of a personal site since around 2008. Most of them were WordPress installs that I tinkered with more than I wrote on. This one is different.
The constraints
- No database
- No CMS
- No JavaScript framework
- Posts are Markdown files
That’s it. The whole thing is files. If I want to move it somewhere else, I copy the folder.
What I actually wanted
A place to write occasionally, collect links, and have an RSS feed. Not a platform. Not a product. A site.
The two-column layout — posts on the left, external feeds on the right — is stolen from old-school blogs that used to aggregate links. I miss that aesthetic.
The tech
Built with Astro. Content collections for blog posts. A simple utility that fetches and parses external RSS feeds at request time.
The external feeds are configured in a single file. Change the file, the feeds update.
The name
From the Donald Hall poem. Worth reading.