Rebuilding this site as a static site

Jun 18, 2026 · static-site architecture

The previous version of this site was a small Spring Boot application: a home page and an in-memory blog. It worked, but it was a server running just to hand back HTML that never changes between deploys. For a personal site that is pure overhead: a JVM, a process, a host, a thing that can fall over at 3am.

A static site removes all of that. The pages are generated once at build time and served as plain files from a CDN. No server, no database, no runtime to patch.

What I want from the tooling

File-based routing, so a new page is just a new file.
Content collections with a schema, so a typo in a post's frontmatter fails the build instead of shipping broken.
Markdown with real syntax highlighting out of the box.
RSS and a sitemap generated for me, not hand-maintained.
Image optimization without wiring a pipeline by hand.

The question I'm working through is whether to get those from an off-the-shelf generator, or to keep the JVM stack and build a bridge to fill the gaps.