About

Small Static is a blog about running a small website without a server. It covers the parts that come up again and again: picking a generator, writing in plain text, publishing with git, choosing a host, and keeping pages fast and easy to find.

The posts are written for people who want a personal site they can keep for ten years. That usually means fewer moving parts, not more.

How this site is built

The site is made with Eleventy. Posts are Markdown files in src/posts/. Running npx @11ty/eleventy turns them into plain HTML in the _site folder, and that folder is what gets uploaded. There is no database and no server code. The styles are one small CSS file that is inlined into each page, and there is no JavaScript of its own.

Every build also writes:

• an Atom feed for feed readers,
• a sitemap for search engines,
• an llms.txt that lists every page with a one-line summary,
• an llms-full.txt with the text of every page in one Markdown file.

The Ask button

The Ask button in the header opens a box where you can type a question about this blog. It reads llms-full.txt, picks the passages that match the question, and writes a short answer with links to the posts it used. The answer comes from OneTag AI through a single script tag, so the site itself stays static.

If you want to know what the box can answer, ask it something the posts cover: which hosts are free, how drafts work, or how big a page should be.

Using this starter

This site is a template. Clone it, change the title in src/_data/site.js, replace the three posts, and deploy. The README explains each step.