Cloudflare Blog

A static blog for a single author. Astro + TypeScript, Markdown content collections, Sveltia CMS at /admin, Pagefind search, Giscus comments, deployed to Cloudflare by its dashboard's own Git integration.

Live URL: https://creativedigitalgrowth.pages.dev/ — see Status below for what's still outstanding.

No server, no database, no tracking scripts, no cookie banner, no CSS framework. Three runtime dependencies. The only client-side JavaScript is a theme toggle, a copy-link button, the search page and the comment widget.

Sibling projects: blog/ (GitHub Pages) and Gitlab-blog/ (GitLab Pages) — same feature set, independent content and git history, deliberately different visual design from each other.

Documentation

Document	What it covers
docs/setup.md	Start here. One-time setup — GitHub repo, Cloudflare Git integration, CMS token, Giscus, contact form, author details
docs/writing.md	Writing and publishing posts, frontmatter reference, drafts, images
docs/architecture.md	How the site is built and why the awkward parts are that way
docs/deployment.md	CI/CD, required Cloudflare configuration, verifying a deploy, rollback
docs/troubleshooting.md	Common failures, with the fix
SECURITY.md	Threat model, token hygiene, why deletion is not erasure
CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md	Ground rules for comments
CLAUDE.md	Conventions for anyone (or anything) editing this repository

Commands

Command	What it does
npm install	Install dependencies
npm run dev	Dev server at http://localhost:4321/ — drafts visible
npm run build	Production build into dist/, then Pagefind indexes it (postbuild)
npm run preview	Serve dist/ — the only faithful test of search, /admin/ and base paths
npm run check	TypeScript + Astro diagnostics

Windows: Smart App Control

If a build fails with "An Application Control policy has blocked this file", Windows Smart App Control is refusing Astro's unsigned native compiler binary. Install the WASI fallback:

npm install --no-save --force @astrojs/compiler-binding-wasm32-wasi

Re-run it after every npm install or npm ci. CI on Linux is unaffected. Details in troubleshooting.md.

Writing a post

Open /admin/ → New Post → uncheck Draft → Save. That commits to main, which builds and deploys.

Or write the file directly — posts are Markdown in src/content/blog/, and the filename is the URL slug:

---
title: "Post title"
description: "One or two sentences, used for cards, meta description and social."
date: "2026-09-02T09:00:00.000Z"
author: "Your Name"
featured_image: "../../assets/images/uploads/something.jpg"
category: "Engineering"
tags: [astro, performance]
draft: false
---

Frontmatter is validated at build time — a typo fails the build instead of shipping broken output, and a failed build leaves the previous version live.

draft: true posts render in npm run dev and are dropped entirely from production: no page, no feed entry, no archive listing, no search hit. Full reference in writing.md.

Base-path safety

This is a root-served site — a Cloudflare Pages project has no sub-path of its own — so base is / and a root-absolute /foo/ link happens to work. That is a coincidence of the current hosting, not a licence to hardcode paths: every internal link still goes through src/lib/url.ts — withBase() for paths you author, absFromBuiltPath() for paths Astro produced, absUrl() for absolute URLs.

To verify after any change, build and confirm every absolute URL points at this site:

grep -rhoE 'https?://[^"< ]+' dist --include=*.html --include=*.xml   | grep -v 'creativedigitalgrowth.pages.dev' | sort -u

Status

This project was scaffolded from the sibling GitHub Pages blog. The repo/deploy pipeline is done:

• GitHub repository created and pushed — public, CreativeDigitalGrowth/cloudflare-blog
• Cloudflare's dashboard connected directly to that repo via its own Git integration
• The site builds and deploys automatically on every push to main
• The site renders at the live URL above

Still outstanding:

• CMS access token, Giscus IDs, contact form endpoint, author details in src/consts.ts

The site also builds and runs locally (npm run dev / npm run build / npm run preview) independent of all of the above. Full checklist in docs/setup.md.