Building this site: the stack and why

I spent longer than I’d like to admit deciding how to build this site.

The problem wasn’t a lack of options — it was too many. Every approach has a vocal advocate and a corresponding horror story. Frameworks that feel like overkill for a blog. CMSes with lock-in. Many of the options felt like too much and honestly I just wanted to get started with writing so I pretty much left the choice up to Claude to figure it out.

Here’s what I landed on and why.

The stack

Astro for the framework. It’s genuinely pleasant to work with — you write mostly HTML and CSS, sprinkle in JavaScript where needed, and it outputs fast static pages. The blog template got me 80% of the way there on day one. This was recommended by Claude.

Cloudflare Pages for hosting. Free tier is generous, deploys are fast, and since my domain is already on Cloudflare, pointing it at the site took about two minutes. It made sense simply because I already use Cloudflare for my domain. It was also an exercise in seeing the capabilities of CloudFlare.

GitHub for source control. The key piece that ties it together: whenever I push changes to the main branch, Cloudflare automatically rebuilds and deploys the site. The workflow ends up being:

Write a post in markdown
git add . && git commit -m "new post"
git push
Site is live within 30 seconds

Right now this process seems to work well for me. I’m not sure if it’s the best way to do it, but it’s a start. The idea of just dumping my thoughts into a .md file and pushing it to github to have it live on the internet is pretty cool to me. In the future I think a lot of this might change.

Why this over other options

I could have used WordPress, or Substack, or any number of hosted platforms. The advantage of this stack is that I own everything. The files live on my machine and on GitHub. The domain is mine. If Cloudflare ever has issues, I can move to Netlify or Vercel in an afternoon. The element of the process being a bit more manual and involved is something I’m enjoying for now. I think expertise is best built through practice. I think that if you want to learn about the pain points people have with their stack, you have to actually use it.

This is just a start, for now.

Vickesh