Hello world
First post. Instead of an empty “hello world” I’m using it to show briefly how the site is built.
The theme
The blog runs on AstroBlogTheme, pulled in straight from GitHub as a package — much like a Hugo module. That keeps the blog repo tiny: a config, a content collection and the posts.
Content
Every post is a Markdown file. One folder per post, one file per language
(de.md, en.md). The folder name links the translations automatically.
Deployment
There is no server that builds Astro. Instead:
From GitHub to the server
A GitHub Actions workflow builds the static site on every push to main and
pushes the output to a dist branch. The web server only clones that branch and
serves the files directly through nginx — no Node, no build step on the box.
GitLab mirror
In parallel the same workflow mirrors everything to a self-hosted GitLab instance as a second copy.
What’s already there
- Light and dark mode
- Full-text search in the browser, no server
- Hugo-style tags under
/tags/ - Bilingual (German and English) via per-language slugs
- RSS and JSON feeds
- Reading time, table of contents and heading anchors
- Custom error pages
- No cookies, no tracking, no external scripts
What’s next
Pagination, an archive by year and an automatic pull on the server are still to come. More on that in later posts.