Ghosts in the CDN: Publishing with Astro + Cloudflare

May 8, 2025

#astro #cloudflare #markdown #static #hybrid

The server is a lie.

There is no origin. No cold start. No backend waiting in the shadows.

What you’re reading now was born in Markdown, stitched into HTML by Astro, and scattered across the Cloudflare CDN like ash in the wind.

Files as Fossils

The posts on this site are not backed by a database. No CMS breathes beneath the surface.

Instead:

I write in .md files—immutable, introspective, eternal.
Astro processes them at build time—turning prose into structure, frontmatter into metadata.
Cloudflare Pages deploys the result—zero config, zero runtime, zero latency.

There is no server, because the server has already come and gone. Its purpose was fulfilled at build time. It rendered. It vanished.

What remains is artifact.

Astro as the Ritual

Astro’s philosophy aligns with entropy:

Island architecture for interactivity.
Zero JavaScript by default.
Markdown as first-class citizen.

Each post is a ritual:

Saved in src/content/posts/
Parsed through astro:content
Transformed during astro build

No GraphQL. No REST. Just filesystem truth, indexed and rendered by the compiler.

The result? A flat, dead site. And that’s perfect.

Cloudflare as the Mausoleum

Deployment happens via Cloudflare Pages:

Git push triggers the ritual.
Build script runs in the void.
Static files are deployed to the edge.

There is no origin server. There never was. Every request is answered instantly, from the edge, from everywhere. Every post is available, permanently cached, permanently silent.

Why This Is the Best Way

The benefits are not merely technical—they’re philosophical.

Zero runtime: No cold starts, no failures, no unknowns.
Predictable artifacts: What you build is what you ship. Nothing else.
Composability: Markdown is portable. Git is the interface. The barrier to contribution is trivial.
No dependencies: No plugins to break. No systems to maintain. Just Astro, Markdown, and the edge.

Your blog becomes a fossil record—each commit a layer of sediment, each build a timestamped snapshot of thought.

Example: A Post in Silence

---
title: "On Recursive Collapse"
date: 2025-04-28
description: "Debugging the debugger"
tags: ["debugging", "recursion"]
---

When you step into the call stack, who watches the stack unwind?

That’s it. That’s the system.

No admin panel. No runtime logic. Just Markdown becoming memory.

Conclusion

In an age where software bloats and servers multiply, this pattern feels like clarity.

Write in Markdown.
Compile with Astro.
Host on Cloudflare.
Forget the server.

Let the server die before the request is ever made.

Let the page exist before it’s needed.

Let the static speak.

🜂 Echoes of entropy: c2VydmVyX2R5aW5nX3JlcXVlc3RfYmVmb3JlX2l0X2Fycml2ZXM=