Building This Blog

I wanted a clean, fast blog to write about AI systems, Elixir, and distributed systems. This post covers how I got from zero to published.

The Starting Point

My old blog at pikender.github.io was a Jekyll site forked years ago. It worked, but the workflow felt dated. I wanted something I could write Markdown in, deploy automatically, and not think about.

A quick search and a suggestion later, AstroPaper stood out — clean, minimal, and ready to go.

Setting Up

Clone the template and install dependencies:

git clone https://github.com/satnaing/astro-paper.git pikender-astro-blog
cd pikender-astro-blog
npm install
npm run dev

The dev server runs at localhost:4321. Everything works immediately — no configuration needed to get started.

Personalising

All site configuration lives in a single file: astro-paper.config.ts. I updated:

site.url, site.title, site.author, site.description
site.timezone → Asia/Kolkata
socials → GitHub and LinkedIn only

The homepage hero text is hardcoded in src/pages/index.astro — I replaced the default greeting and intro paragraph with my own.

For the About page (src/content/pages/about.md), I pulled content from my old Jekyll blog rather than writing from scratch.

Cleaning Up the Template Posts

The template ships with 18 documentation and example posts. Before deleting them, I read through all of them and extracted the useful tips — configuration options, workflows, color schemes — into a reference file at src/content/_tips/astro-tips.md.

Files prefixed with _ are excluded from routing by the glob loader, so this file stays in the repo as a personal reference without appearing as a blog post.

After that, I deleted all 18 template posts and the 5 template images in src/assets/images/.

Writing a Post

The day-to-day workflow is simple. Start the dev server:

npm run dev

Create a new .md file in src/content/posts/ with the required frontmatter:

---
title: "Building This Blog"
author: "Pikender Sharma"
pubDatetime: 2026-10-25T11:03:10Z
description: "How I set up this blog — from cloning a template to publishing on GitHub Pages."
tags: ["meta", "astro"]
featured: true
draft: false
---

Post content here.

The post shows up live at localhost:4321 immediately. When ready to publish, commit and push to main — the GitHub Actions workflow picks it up and deploys automatically.

Git Hooks

I set up Husky with two hooks to automate the boring parts:

pre-commit — automatically sets pubDatetime on new posts and updates modDatetime on edits. No more manually copying ISO timestamps.

pre-push — runs npm run build before every push. If the build breaks, the push is blocked. Catches issues locally before they fail in CI.

The hooks live in .husky/ and are committed to the repo. The prepare script in package.json activates them automatically after npm install on any machine.

Deploy Setup

My old repo pikender/pikender.github.io was a Jekyll fork. I initially force-pushed main with the new Astro content, but then decided to rename the old repo to preserve it and create a fresh pikender.github.io repo for the new blog.

For CI/CD, I added a deploy workflow at .github/workflows/deploy.yml that triggers on every push to main:

Install dependencies
Run npm build — Astro generates static HTML into dist/
Upload and deploy to GitHub Pages

In the GitHub repo settings, I set Pages source to GitHub Actions instead of the legacy branch deploy.

Every push to main now builds and deploys automatically.

What’s Next

The blog is live. Next up: writing about the actual work — LLM evals, agent architectures in Elixir, and distributed systems patterns.