How this site is built, for free
By Alex Calabrese · Markdown
I wanted a personal site with plenty of motion that stayed fast and didn’t add a monthly bill. Here’s what I settled on.
Static first
The site is built with Astro, which turns everything into plain HTML at build time. Posts like this one are just Markdown files in a folder, so publishing is a matter of adding a file.
Motion where it counts
The living background uses a small, lazily loaded WebGL shader. Native scrolling and CSS handle the interactions. Animations run regardless of the system motion preference.
Hosting
It runs as static assets on Cloudflare Workers. Requests for static assets are free and unlimited, so the only real cost is renewing the domain.