Public1 min readDebmalya Pramanik
Why This Blog Is Static-First
A short note on why blog.typhed.com ships as pre-rendered HTML to GitHub Pages — and what that buys us.
engineeringarchitecture
This blog builds to plain HTML with Next.js output: "export" and is served from
GitHub Pages. No server runs at request time. That constraint is a feature.
What we get
- Speed. Pages are pre-rendered and cached at the edge; there is nothing to compute when a reader arrives.
- Cost. Static hosting on Pages is free, which keeps the whole site — and its ad revenue — firmly in the black.
- Simplicity. Every post is a file in
content/blog/. Writing is editing Markdown, not operating a database.
The one rule to remember
Anything that needs a server — API routes, next start, on-demand rendering —
will not work here. Everything a post needs is resolved at build time, which is
why the math and code highlighting above are baked into the HTML rather than
rendered in the browser.
That is the whole trade: give up the server, get a fast, cheap, durable site.