MyFolio

The Problem

Most personal sites either go stale because updating them means touching code, or they lean on a heavy CMS just to publish a paragraph of text. I wanted neither — a site where adding a new post or project is exactly as easy as writing a Markdown file, with nothing else standing in the way of actually publishing.

What it does

About Me, Notes, and Workbench section — all real content living in plain Markdown files, not hardcoded into components. Adding a new blog post or project is: drop a file in the right folder with the right frontmatter, redeploy, done. The Notes page filters by category and lets a visitor subscribe by topic — a real pipeline, not just a form that collects addresses nobody reads, emailing subscribers when a genuinely new post goes up. The About page has a click-to-enlarge photo.

How it is built

Astro content collections hold the blog posts, projects, and About Me content, each checked against a schema at build time — a bad frontmatter field fails the build instead of shipping a broken page. The look has already been rebuilt once: it started as a warm “field notebook” style and is now a flatter, more technical one, but the underlying content and structure never had to change for that.

The subscribe pipeline is a small serverless setup living outside Astro’s own build: a Vercel Function stores each subscriber in Vercel Blob (a key-value store, no separate database), and a scheduled function checks the site’s own RSS feed daily, emailing only the subscribers whose topic picks match a genuinely new post, via Resend. It originally ran on Netlify’s equivalents — moved to Vercel after the Netlify account hosting it was suspended and later deleted for good.

A simple tech stack workflow to understand

Markdown file (+ frontmatter)
   → Astro content collection (schema-checked)
   → page template renders it
   → static HTML at build time
   → deployed to Vercel

Every page itself is zero-runtime — Vercel just serves the static files. The one exception is the subscribe/notify pipeline, a small serverless layer that runs independently of the static build and doesn’t touch it.

Where it stands

This is my own site — I use it to publish my writing and track my own projects, not a product I’m shipping for other people to sign up for. It’s live on its own domain, I update it constantly, and there’s no separate “launch” moment coming.