This site
This write-up is a starter draft. It records the scaffold, not a finished project history. Edit until every sentence is one you would keep.
Goal
Put a usable Version 1 of a personal learning journal on the web: a landing page, a blog, and a showcase, with a publish path that does not require a CMS.
What was built
A static Astro site. Content lives in Markdown collections. Navigation is Home, Blog, and Showcase. Drafts render in local development and are omitted from production builds.
The public wording on the site at scaffold time is placeholder copy, not a claim that the journal is already in use.
Tools and approaches
- Project approach, architect brief, and designer brief written first, then used as constraints rather than as decoration.
- Astro 6 with content collections for blog, showcase, and the landing page.
- Git-based publishing. GitHub Pages (or any static host that serves
dist/) for free hosting.
Friction and judgment calls
- Stack before author review. The architect brief said to recommend and wait. The instruction to scaffold the project overrode that. The choice is reversible: the content is Markdown and the output is static files.
- Identity. The site title and footer do not assume a name or a photo. Those can be added in
src/site.tsif wanted. - Starter drafts marked as drafts. Shipping empty sections would make the layout hard to judge. Shipping unmarked essays would pretend the author had already written them.
What I would do differently
Write the first real showcase entry from completed work (for example the file-declutter experiment) before treating this page as the launch piece. This file can stay as a working log of the site itself, or be replaced.