Building This Site: A Content Engine, Not a Blog

September 5, 2026

This is the first article on this site — really more of a test that the content engine works end-to-end than a “real” article.

Why a flat folder + tags?

Instead of one folder per topic (android/, space/, …), every article lives in the same src/content/articles/ folder. Topic is just a tags field in the frontmatter above. That means a single article can belong to multiple topics without duplicating files or picking one “home” folder for it.

How a request flows through the build

graph TD
    A[Write a .md file] --> B[Astro's glob loader picks it up]
    B --> C[Zod schema validates frontmatter]
    C --> D[getCollection reads it at build time]
    D --> E[Static HTML page generated]
    E --> F[Deployed to GitHub Pages]

That’s it — no database, no admin panel, no manual “register this post” step. Commit a markdown file, push, and the site rebuilds itself.