Starting a blog in 2026, for free

This is a sample post. Delete it, or edit it into something real — either way, it’s just a Markdown file sitting in src/content/blog/.

The thing about paying for a blog

Every hosted platform sells you the same trade: they handle the boring parts, you accept their ceiling. That’s a fine deal, right up until you want to move a sidebar three pixels and find out it’s a paid tier away.

The best time to own your own content was ten years ago. The second best time is now.

So this site is a pile of Markdown files and some HTML. Cloudflare serves it for free. If I ever want to leave, I copy a folder.

What Markdown gives you

You get all the usual things without thinking about it:

• Bold, italic, strikethrough, and links
• Lists, obviously
• Footnotes, tables, block quotes

Code blocks get syntax highlighting automatically, in both light and dark mode:

const posts = await getCollection('blog');
const recent = posts
  .sort((a, b) => b.data.pubDate - a.data.pubDate)
  .slice(0, 5);

And tables work fine:

Platform	Year 1	Creative control
This site	£0	Total
WordPress.com Premium	~£75	Themed
Squarespace	~£160	Templated

Writing your next post

Two ways, both equally valid:

1. In the browser — go to /admin, click New Post, type, hit publish. It commits to GitHub for you and the site rebuilds in about 30 seconds.
2. In a text editor — drop a .md file in src/content/blog/, git push. Same result.

The frontmatter block at the top of this file is the only structure you need to keep: title, description, pubDate, and optionally tags, heroImage, and draft.

Set draft: true and a post stays visible while you’re running npm run dev but never makes it into the built site. Handy for half-finished thoughts.