I decided to create a simple static blog. The only idea: post every week one small thing I focused on or was asked about.

Started with Jekyll — the obvious choice for GitHub Pages. Went through the Ruby setup dance on macOS.

It works, but the Ruby toolchain friction (chruby, bundler, gem versions) felt like overhead for something that should be simple.

Switched to Astro — no Ruby, no gem hell, just Node:

npm create astro@latest
npm run dev

Content lives in src/content/blog/ as plain Markdown files. Frontmatter schema is minimal — title, description, pubDate, optional tags. That’s it.

Every branch and every commit gets its own preview URL out of the box — no extra configuration needed.

To build and preview the production output locally before pushing:

npm run build
npm run preview

Merging to master triggers the Cloudflare pipeline and deploys automatically.

Astro was the right call. Zero framework magic in the Markdown files, fast builds, and the local dev server is instant.