Hello World

This is the first post on a static blog built with Ruby, NGINX, and Kamal.

The entire site is a collection of markdown files converted to HTML at Docker build time. No application server, no JavaScript framework — just static files served by NGINX.

How it works

A small Ruby script reads each markdown file, runs it through Redcarpet with Rouge for syntax highlighting, wraps it in an ERB layout, and writes the result to _site/.

posts = Dir["posts/*.md"].map { |f| parse_post(f) }

posts.each do |post|
  html = markdown.render(post[:body])
  write_page(post[:slug], title: post[:title], content: html)
end

The Dockerfile does this in a multi-stage build — Ruby in the first stage, then the output gets copied into an NGINX image. Kamal deploys the NGINX container.

Why?

Sometimes you just want to write and ship.