blog.francisespejo.com

My blog. Manuals, reviews, opinions and whatever else is worth writing down.

blog.francisespejo.com

What goes here

It is new, so it is still filling up. The plan is roughly this.

• Manuals and how-tos, the kind I write after solving something the hard way and not wanting to solve it twice
• Reviews of tools, services and hardware I actually use
• Opinions, mostly around security, systems and privacy
• Notes, shorter pieces that do not need a full article

Everything is written and reviewed by me. No generative AI. Bilingual, Spanish and English, with a language switch in the header.

Stack

Built with Astro, which suits a blog well. Content lives in markdown, Astro renders it to static HTML at build time, and the browser gets almost no JavaScript.

• Astro for the content pipeline and templating
• TypeScript for config and components
• Plain CSS, no framework
• Base theme: Zahit (MIT), heavily adjusted

Hosting and deploys

GitHub Pages, deployed by GitHub Actions. Every push to main triggers the workflow in .github/workflows, which builds the site and publishes it. The custom domain sits in public/CNAME and the DNS lives in Cloudflare.

No server, no database, nothing to patch. A static site is one less thing that can be attacked while I am asleep.

Running it locally

git clone https://github.com/FrancisEspejo/Blog.FrancisEspejo.com.git
cd Blog.FrancisEspejo.com
npm install
npm run dev

Then open http://localhost:4321.

To check what will actually be deployed.

npm run build
npm run preview

Writing a post

Posts are markdown files under src/content/blog/, split by language into es/ and en/. Add the file, fill in the frontmatter, push, and the workflow does the rest.

Related

• francisespejo.com is my landing page
• domainwalk is a CLI I wrote that audits the public surface of a domain

License

Code is MIT, see LICENSE. The posts themselves are mine, so please link rather than republish.