This is the first post on the blog. It exists mostly to prove the whole pipeline works end to end: I write Markdown, a build step turns it into a static website, and it deploys itself.

Why Markdown is not the ceiling

The prose you’re reading is Markdown. But Markdown composes with richer things. The most useful one for me is Mermaid — diagrams written as text, rendered to real graphics in the browser. Because they’re text, they live in git and edit in place just like the rest of a post.

Here’s the exact workflow that publishes this page:

flowchart TD
    A[Idea] --> B{Worth a post?}
    B -->|Yes| C[Draft in Markdown]
    B -->|No| D[Toss in notes]
    C --> E[Add a Mermaid diagram]
    E --> F[git commit]
    F --> G[git push]
    G --> H[GitHub Actions builds the site]
    H --> I[Live on the web]

What each piece is doing

  • Astro takes the Markdown and builds a folder of plain HTML/CSS/JS.
  • Mermaid turns the fenced mermaid block above into that flowchart.
  • GitHub Actions rebuilds and redeploys every time I push.
  • GitHub Pages serves the result — no server, nothing to hack.

To add a new post, I drop another Markdown file in src/content/blog/, give it a title and date, and push. That’s the whole loop.