Choosing the Right Stack for a Simple Blog

A simple blog is a writing system, not an app. I wanted this one to be easy to write, easy to maintain, and boring to operate.

So the stack is Eleventy + Markdown + plain CSS. No frontend framework, no database, no runtime server. Posts live in src/posts/*.md, and Eleventy turns them into static HTML.

The key choice was to optimize for publishing speed, not feature count. Frontmatter stays small (title and date), slugs come from filenames, and anything that adds friction stays out.

The structure is intentionally small:

• / is the archive list
• /blog/<slug>/ is each post page
• one shared base layout and one post layout

That gives me enough flexibility without architecture overhead. For anyone who wants the exact shape, here it is:

.
├── eleventy.config.js
├── package.json
├── src
│   ├── index.njk
│   ├── _data
│   │   └── site.js
│   ├── _includes
│   │   └── layouts
│   │       ├── base.njk
│   │       └── post.njk
│   ├── assets
│   │   └── styles.css
│   └── posts
│       ├── posts.11tydata.js
│       └── *.md
└── _site
    └── ...generated static output...

Deployment is simple with GitHub and Cloudflare Pages.

For a solo author who wants low maintenance and static deploys, this is the right stack: fast local iteration, simple deploys, and a workflow that keeps the focus on writing.