How I host this site

I always wonder how people host and get content to their site so I thought I’d show how I do it.

I used to have a markdown to static site creator pipeline using Jekyll and hosted on Google Cloud. It was okay but the friction of pushing content had me never updating things. Then I spent a couple of years on Obsidian Publish, which made writing easy but wasn’t a real blog. Now I have the best of both.

• Squarespace Domains is the registrar of my domain name. It was Google Domains until Google sold that business to Squarespace.
• I point the registrar to DNS from Cloudflare, it’s a free service.
• I use Obsidian to write for the site.
  • The vault is a folder inside a private GitHub repository, right next to the code for the site. It’s still a different vault than my normal PKM. I don’t want to chance posting all my documents.
• Pushing to GitHub kicks off Cloudflare Workers Builds, which builds the site with Astro.
  • Astro turns the markdown into plain HTML. A small plugin handles the Obsidian-isms like [[wikilinks]], embedded images and callouts.
• The built site is served by Cloudflare Workers as static files, which costs me nothing at this size.

That diagram is a Diagrammo diagram, written as text right in the post and drawn when the site builds. Diagrams live in the markdown instead of being screenshots I have to keep re-exporting.

I manage the site itself with Claude Code. It did the move off Obsidian Publish, including keeping the old links working, and I iterate on the layout by describing what I want. Because it’s all in git, I can work on it from any of my computers.

The theme is Slate, the color palette I made for Diagrammo. Before this I used kepano’s Minimal for Obsidian Publish theme, Nord to be specific.

Moving off Obsidian Publish fixed the things I used to complain about. Posts have dates, there’s a writing index organized like a blog, and there’s an RSS feed. It’s also free instead of $8 a month. The one thing I gave up is publishing from my iPad with a tap; now a post goes live when it gets committed and pushed.