I forgot to pay my Siteground subscription a few months ago, and didn’t check the inbox they sent the payment reminders to, so they nuked my entire site and all the data.
I wasn’t mad about it. A fresh start wasn’t a bad idea.
But then I checked Wayback Machine and it turns out, it has most of my old site indexed. Hooray!
This gave me the opportunity to rebuild everything from scratch.
The old site was built with WordPress. But this time, to avoid the possibility of having my entire site nuked because I didn’t pay ~$300 worth of annual hosting fees, I decided to go static.
My friend, Kirill, kindly volunteered to help me set everything up using Astro and Cloudflare Pages, but I figured I would give it a go and spent a day setting everything up myself.
Here’s my setup
- Astro which is a framework for static sites.
- Miniblog is the theme I’m using. Funnily enough, it seems like the theme was completely rebuilt between yesterday and today. So my site looks different from the live demo.
- GitHub stores everything.
- Obsidian is my text editor. People talk about it so much, and I finally get the hype. I found it super easy to customise every tiny detail of my workflow. More on that later.
- Cloudflare Pages hosts everything for free.
Set Up and Migration
The migration process was fairly painless.
I worked with Claude to make small edits to the theme until I was happy with how it looked.
Setting up Obsidian took a bit of time, but that’s only because it was unexpectedly flexible and let me fine tune my workflow to the nth degree.
Most importantly, I installed the Git and Templater plugins. The former lets me commit and sync posts directly to GitHub. And the latter adds a bunch of meta fields to the top of each post to make my life easier.
The Git plugin worked immediately and magically, and I never had to worry about it.
The Templater plugin was less simple, and it took me awhile to set it up properly. This was largely due to how I had set up the file directory in Obsidian vs Astro. Making sure that the templates were in the right folder was not obvious, but I managed to figure it out with Claude.
I was really pleased to find that there are options and keyboard shortcut options for everything. This really helped me fine tune my workflow.
And then it was a simple matter of copying old posts from Wayback Machine into Obsidian. At first I considered only importing the ones I really liked (aka the ones I found less embarrassing), but then I quickly realised that even the earlier, more cringe ones have their value too. It’s kind of nice to look back on peak covid 2020 Lesley to see what she was thinking and feeling.
Set up difficulty level
Maybe a 5/10?
In my case, I know enough to know what I want, notice when something’s wrong, and ask the right questions. I then relied completely on Claude for the answers.
I found that whenever I encountered problems, Claude would try to solve it once or twice, then, if it still didn’t work, Claude would suggest a suboptimal workaround. I had to insist on doing it the way I wanted each time.
If you don’t really understand what was happening, I think you could still set up a blog for free using Astro and Cloudflare Pages, but you’d probably be making compromises without even knowing it.
As an example, Claude initially suggested I use Astro, Cloudflare and write posts in VS Code directly. I told it I wanted a nicer editor, so it recommended I download something to make the VS Code editor nicer. It also suggested I use a CMS called Tina.
But when I looked into it, both options weren’t what I wanted. So I specifically asked if there was another way I could do it with a different text editor. It then suggested I look into Obsidian and a few other text editors. I settled on Obsidian.
Inside Obsidian, it then told me that I had to add the following to the top of every post:
title: "My First Post"
description: "A short description"
date: 2026-04-15This felt really finicky. Fortunately, I knew to ask it if there was a way that I could turn this into a template. It then suggested I download a plugin on Templater.
Upon installing Templater, it stored the templates in the wrong folder because of how I had set up my vault in Obsidian. This meant that the templates couldn’t be read by Astro, which caused an error and prevented my site from publishing.
After some troubleshooting, Claude recommended I re-code how Astro reads templates. That seemed like a really bad and fragile solution. Instead, I just created a new vault in Obsidian, using the right hierarchy of files this time, and everything worked smoothly.
And so on…
My point in sharing all this is that if you didn’t know to ask Claude these questions, you’d be stuck writing blog posts in VS Code and manually copy-pasting “title, description, date” into every post. Or maybe you follow Claude’s advice and end up with some fragile code that could break if you update your Astro version.
Overall, I think this experience is on par with my experience with AI. It does what it’s told, but you still need to be experienced and knowledgeable enough to tell it what to do. This is also why I’m really skeptical about vibe-coded apps made by people who don’t know any code at all.
My new blogging workflow
Now that everything is set up, my workflow happens entirely in Obsidian.
So now it’s just cmd+n to create a new post and cmd+shift+s to commit and sync it.
It doesn’t get easier than that. And the best part is… Everything is free!
My one gripe
When working with a static site, every time you push an update, Cloudflare rebuilds the whole site, which can take much longer than just publishing a post on a CMS and being able to see it immediately.
Admittedly, it’s only a few minutes long (right now), but I’m impatient!