I've integrated the Sveltia CMS to this site to make it easier to publish more often

When I moved this site off WordPress, I gave up one thing I actually liked: logging in from anywhere and just writing. The new site is faster, cheaper, and far easier to reason about. Every post is a Markdown file in a Git repo. The catch is that publishing meant opening a code editor, naming a file correctly, and pushing a commit. That’s fine at my desk. It’s a lot less fun from a laptop on the couch.

So I added a CMS. Sort of.

A CMS that isn’t really there

The tool is Sveltia CMS, a modern take on the old Netlify CMS (now Decap) idea. What makes it interesting is everything it doesn’t need:

• No database. My posts stay exactly where they were, as Markdown files in Git.
• No server. It’s a single static page at /admin/ that runs entirely in the browser and talks straight to the GitHub API.
• No new hosting. The site still deploys the same way it always has.

The whole integration is two files: an HTML page that loads one script, and a YAML file that describes my content. That’s it. The site itself didn’t change at all.

How publishing works now

When I save a post, the CMS opens a draft pull request on GitHub. I can come back to it, tweak it, and leave it sitting there as long as I want. When I hit Publish, the CMS merges that pull request, my server notices the change, and the site rebuilds itself about a minute later.

That’s the part I like most. I get a friendly editor, but under the hood every post is still a commit with a full history. If I ever want to leave Sveltia, there’s nothing to migrate. The content was never locked inside it.

A few details I’m happy with

• Images get optimized automatically. Uploads are converted to WebP and resized on the way in, so I don’t have to run them through a separate tool first.
• Filenames take care of themselves. New posts get the date-and-slug filename my site expects, built from the post’s date.
• The old stuff survives. My migrated WordPress posts carry some extra bookkeeping data. I tested that editing one in the CMS leaves all of it intact.
• Video posts are protected. Posts with embedded video use a slightly different format, so the CMS gives them a plain text editor instead of the rich one. That keeps it from “helpfully” mangling the embed code.

The test

The real test is this post. I wrote it in the new editor, saved it as a draft, and published it from the browser. If you’re reading it, everything worked.

If you’re not reading it, well, you’re not reading this sentence either, so I guess we’ll never know.