Tuan's Blog

About this blog (and how to get your own in 5 minutes)

·3 min read·#meta#markdown-blog-starter

This blog runs on markdown-blog-starter — a small stack I built for myself and open sourced. If you want a personal blog that is fast, free to host, and easy to edit, clone it:

git clone https://github.com/tuanphungcz/markdown-blog-starter
cd markdown-blog-starter
npm install
npm run deploy

Or click Deploy to Cloudflare in the README and skip the terminal entirely.

What it does

  • Markdown posts with YAML frontmatter (title, date, summary, tags, draft)
  • RSS feed at /feed.xml, sitemap at /sitemap.xml, plus robots.txt
  • Auto-generated OG images for every post (via Satori)
  • Reading time estimated from word count
  • Dark and light mode that follows your system preference
  • Deployed to Cloudflare Workers — free tier is plenty, edge-fast everywhere
  • No bloat — TanStack Start, Tailwind, marked. That's it.

One config file (site.config.ts) controls your name, domain, and socials. One folder (content/blog/) holds your posts. That's the whole mental model.

What a post looks like

The frontmatter is plain YAML:

---
title: "My first post"
date: "2026-04-15"
summary: "Short description used for the listing page and RSS."
tags: ["intro"]
---

Your markdown here...

Set draft: true to keep a post out of the listing while you work on it.

Formatting examples

Everything you'd expect from markdown works. Here's what you get out of the box.

Headings, emphasis, links

Bold and italic render the way you'd expect. Links like markdown-blog-starter on GitHub use the convention of putting the bold inside the brackets — [**text**](url) — so the underline matches the bold weight.

Lists

  • Bullet points
  • Work fine
  • Nested too:
    • Like this
    • And this
  1. Numbered lists
  2. Also work
  3. In the obvious way

Blockquotes

Quotes render with a left border and muted text. Handy for pulling out a line from a source or an old tweet.

Code

Inline code like npm run deploy sits nicely in a sentence. Fenced blocks get a monospace font and a subtle background:

// site.config.ts
export const siteConfig = {
  name: "Your Name",
  title: "Your Blog",
  url: "https://yourdomain.com",
  social: {
    github: "yourhandle",
    twitter: "yourhandle",
  },
};

Tables

Feature Where it lives
Site metadata site.config.ts
Posts content/blog/*.md
Deploy config wrangler.toml
Routes src/routes/

Horizontal rules

Use --- on its own line to drop a divider, like the ones separating sections in this post.

The whole workflow

  1. Write a markdown file in content/blog/.
  2. Run npm run deploy.
  3. It's live.

That's it. No CMS, no database, no build pipeline to babysit. If you can edit a text file, you can run this blog.

Fork it, make it yours, and send me the URL — I'd love to read what you write.