Pagecraft Journal

A calmer way to publish a small site

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A calmer way to publish a small site

A personal site does not need a dashboard, a database, or a long setup ritual. It needs a place for writing, a dependable build, and enough structure to make old work easy to find.

Pagecraft keeps those pieces close together. Posts stay in Markdown, the site configuration stays in one YAML file, and templates remain ordinary HTML.

from pagecraft.builder import Builder

Builder(".").build()

That small surface area is intentional. The generator should make publishing feel lighter, not add another system to maintain.

Why incremental builds are a publishing feature

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Why incremental builds are a publishing feature

Fast builds are not just an engineering benchmark. They change how often someone is willing to preview a draft, adjust a title, or fix a tiny link.

Pagecraft renders the complete set of derived pages in memory, compares content hashes, writes only changed files, and removes stale output after a rename or deletion. That means tag pages, feeds, archives, pagination, and the sitemap stay honest without asking authors to remember a special command.

The important part is not merely skipping work. It is keeping the generated site correct when the source changes.

A publishing workflow that stays out of the way

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A publishing workflow that stays out of the way

A good publishing routine can be almost boring. Start a post, add a short description, preview it locally, and publish when it is ready.

Pagecraft provides a small command for the first step:

pagecraft new-post "A useful title" --category Publishing --tag writing

Drafts can stay beside published work without leaking into the public build. Future-dated posts work the same way. When a release is ready, a regular build handles the feed, archive, tags, categories, and search-engine discovery files in the same pass.

The case for plain HTML at the end of the build

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The case for plain HTML at the end of the build

There is comfort in a final build that is just files. It can live on a basic web host, a CDN, a repository-backed page, or a folder copied to another machine.

That portability does not require sacrificing the familiar parts of a modern publication. A static build can still include canonical URLs, social metadata, a sitemap, an RSS feed, and well-organized archives.

The source can evolve. The published result stays easy to inspect.