How this site is built — Christopher Chalcraft

I rebuilt this site from scratch with three goals: it should be simple, fast, and easy to maintain — including by AI agents working from my notes. Here’s the shape of it.

Content is just Markdown

Every article is a single Markdown file in src/content/articles/. The filename is the URL slug, and a small block of frontmatter carries the metadata:

---
title: How this site is built
description: A short summary used in listings and meta tags.
pubDate: 2026-09-30
tags: [meta, astro, web]
draft: false
---

Astro content collections validate that frontmatter against a schema at build time, so a typo in a date or a missing field fails loudly instead of shipping broken.

No CSS framework

The styling is hand-written CSS with a small set of design tokens — colors, a type scale, spacing — defined once as custom properties. Light and dark themes are the same tokens with different values. There’s no build step to understand and nothing to purge.

Deployed on Cloudflare Pages

astro build emits a fully static site to dist/, which Cloudflare Pages serves from its edge for free. A push to the main branch triggers a rebuild.

Built to be extended by agents

Adding a post is: drop a Markdown file in one folder, fill in the frontmatter, done. That’s deliberate — I keep working notes elsewhere and let an agent turn them into drafts here, following the conventions documented in CONTRIBUTING.md and the behaviors under .agents/.