The whole point of this site is to write down what I actually do, so the first entry is about building the site.
What I set up
Astro, with posts as plain markdown files. No database, no CMS login. Writing an entry means creating a file in a folder and pushing it.
The site generates its own social cards at build time, numbers each entry by day, and tracks which days I logged. Zero client-side JavaScript ships to the page.
What went wrong
Vercel cloned my repo under a different name. I had renamed the project to
buildlog2, and Vercel created a new GitHub repo to match — but my local folder was
still pointing at the old one. Every push went to a repo nothing was watching.
Fixed with git remote set-url.
GitHub Actions kept failing. The project shipped with a Pages workflow I didn’t need, since Vercel handles deployment. It threw a 404 on every push until I deleted it.
The domain
Bought muhammedaliyay.com on Namecheap, pointed it at Vercel with an A record and a CNAME. This part was easier than I expected.