This site is a TanStack Start app, but there is no server behind it. At build time every route is rendered to a static HTML file, and GitHub Pages serves those files like any other static site.

Why not a plain single-page app?

A client-rendered React app ships an empty <div id="root"> and fills it in with JavaScript. That works for people, but it is a poor fit for a blog: search engines and link previews see far less, and the first paint waits on the bundle.

Prerendering gives the best of both. Each page arrives as complete HTML, then React hydrates it and navigation between pages is instant, client-side routing as usual.

The important bit of config

tanstackStart({
  prerender: {
    enabled: true,
    crawlLinks: true,
  },
})

With crawlLinks on, the build starts at the home page and follows every internal link it finds, so a new post is picked up as soon as something links to it.

Writing posts

Posts are Markdown files in content/posts. They are imported at build time with Vite's import.meta.glob, so there is no server function involved, which matters because a static host has nowhere to run one.

Deploying

A GitHub Actions workflow runs npm run build on every push and publishes the output to Pages. Other repos with Pages enabled show up under this domain at their own path, which is where side projects live.