I wanted a site I could run for years without touching code: new categories, galleries, YouTube Shorts and affiliate links, all from a browser. Here is what that looks like under the hood.

The stack

  • Astro renders every page on demand from the database
  • Cloudflare Workers hosts it on the free plan
  • D1 (SQLite) stores articles, categories, tags and pages
  • R2 stores photos, resized to WebP at upload time
  • A small Preact editor powers the admin area
Sketches of the site layout
Early sketches of the layout: hero, categories, latest, selected.

Why not WordPress?

Speed, mostly. A photo-heavy travel post should load instantly on a phone in a hotel lobby with bad Wi-Fi. Static-first rendering, responsive WebP images and almost no JavaScript on the public site make that possible.

Embeds

Videos are YouTube embeds that load only when you press play, so a page with three videos is not three megabytes heavier.

A Short about the build Watch on YouTube ↗

Affiliate links

Every affiliate link is a proper block with a disclosure line and rel="sponsored", and partners can be managed globally so that changing one URL updates every article.

Embeds from Google Maps, Vimeo or Spotify work the same way.

This paragraph comes from a custom HTML block, sanitised on save.

Read the AI tools post