How the Blog Is Built

I wanted a space where I could draft ideas fast and publish them without negotiating with a heavyweight CMS or JavaScript framework. The solution is this tiny Flask app: it reads Markdown files from posts/, extracts front-matter metadata with YAML, and renders everything with Jinja templates.

There’s no database, no admin console, and no notion of components that need compiling. Writing is nothing more than dropping a .md file into the repository. The Python code walks the directory, sorts the posts by date, and injects each file into a simple layout. The retro styling and new animated background come from hand-written CSS and a WebGL snippet that only runs on the homepage.

Keeping it lightweight means I can swap laptops, edit in any text editor, and still publish by pushing Markdown. I get syntax-highlighted code blocks through Markdown extensions, Prism for inline snippets, and zero build step beyond flask run. This workflow keeps the focus on the words, not on wrestling with a “real” block framework just to ship a post.

Drafts and unlisted posts

I keep WIP posts in the repo but hide them from the homepage.

Add stub, draft, or unlisted to the YAML front matter tags: list.
The homepage template filters out posts tagged Stub, Draft, or Unlisted.
The post still renders if you know the URL (/post/<filename>.html), so it is effectively unlisted.

Publishing

When I’m ready to publish:

Remove stub / draft from the tags
Run the freeze step to generate the static site into docs/:
bash python freeze.py
Commit and push

Meta Workflow