A No-Frills Recipe for a Static Blog

July 9, 2025

I’ve always been captivated by those spartan academic websites—just plain HTML, no bells, no whistles. Working that way forces you to focus on words instead of tinkering with WordPress plug-ins, React gizmos, or whatever the latest modular-CSS fad happens to be. Substack and Medium try to offer that same “just write” experience, but on their terms and inside their business models. Strangely, we teach newcomers to start with Markdown, yet seasoned developers often bury themselves under “enterprise-grade” tooling before they’ve typed the first sentence. One lesson the pros could steal from academia: sometimes it’s perfectly fine to do things that don’t scale.

Where Simplicity Meets Consistency

For me, the sweet spot is a static-site generator—as long as you resist the urge to over-engineer your templates on day one. I chose Eleventy because it keeps the ceremony low: its templating language feels intuitive, and if you’d rather stay in raw Markdown, that’s fine too. Eleventy stays out of your way.

Hosting: Any Old File Server Will Do

Serving a static blog is gloriously boring. With just a handful of posts and an even smaller handful of readers, you could run an ngrok tunnel from your laptop and call it a day. Not ideal, but it works. I’m opting for Cloudflare Pages backed by Workers. I already use Cloudflare as a proxy, and pairing a static site with their CDN feels natural—especially because a white-labeled domain lets me migrate painlessly if I ever change my mind.

Ground Rules to Keep Me Honest

Text First

Media lives elsewhere. Social platforms are better suited for heavy visuals, while blog posts can stay—gasp—mostly text.

Minimal Styling

I’ll lean on default or widely available CSS frameworks. Styling is fun right up until it steals time from writing.

No External Trinkets

Ads, comment widgets, even RSS feeds—all sidelined for now. Every embed is one more thing to maintain or moderate, and social media already satisfies the urge for conversation.

By constraining myself to these guidelines, I’m banking on an old truth: the less I fuss with tooling, the more I’ll actually publish. After all, the point of a blog isn’t to showcase my CSS chops—it’s to share ideas.