Why I Built My Own Blog

Platforms come and go. Your words should stay.

The Problem

Every few years, a platform dies or changes its rules:

• Google Reader shut down
• Medium paywalled everything
• Twitter became... whatever it is now

Your content shouldn't depend on someone else's business model.

The Solution

A folder of markdown files. That's it.

No database. No framework. No dependencies that break.

Just text files that will open in 50 years.

The Architecture

I still write on Substack. It's where my subscribers are, where the discussion happens, and where the writing workflow works best.

But every 15 minutes, a GitHub Action wakes up and does something simple: it checks my RSS feeds, pulls in any new posts, converts them to markdown, and commits them to my repository.

Substack → RSS Feed → GitHub Action → Markdown → Static HTML → My Domain

The result: I publish where it's convenient, but I own where it matters.

How It Works

The system has three scripts that run in sequence:

1. update-posts.js — The Importer

This script fetches my RSS feeds (personal Substack and Cybersecurity Notes), extracts the full content from , and converts Substack's messy HTML into clean markdown.

It handles:

• Hero images preserved from Substack CDN
• Blockquotes, code blocks, lists
• Bold, italic, and nested formatting
• Stripping Substack boilerplate ("Subscribe to...", "Thanks for reading...")

Each imported post gets YAML frontmatter with title, date, slug, and a link back to the original.

Every post ends with: Originally published on Substack

Credit where it's due. But the words live here now.

2. update-blog.js — The Builder

This script reads the posts/ directory, parses each markdown file, and generates static HTML pages in blog/.

No build tools. No npm install. Just Node.js reading files and writing files.

The HTML is self-contained — fonts, styles, everything inline. Each post is a single HTML file that will render in any browser, forever.

3. The GitHub Action

name: Update Content

on: schedule: 
 
cron: '/15    *'
 
 workflow_dispatch:


jobs: update: runs-on: ubuntu-latest steps: 
 
uses: actions/checkout@v4
 
uses: actions/setup-node@v4
 
 with: node-version: '20' 
 
name: Build blog from markdown
 
 run: node scripts/update-blog.js 
 
name: Import posts from RSS feeds
 
 run: node scripts/update-posts.js 
 
name: Rebuild blog with imported posts
 
 run: node scripts/update-blog.js 
 
name: Commit changes
 
 run: | git diff --quiet && git diff --cached --quiet || ( git config user.name "github-actions[bot]" git config user.email "github-actions[bot]@users.noreply.github.com" git add posts/ blog/ index.html archive.html blog-posts.json git commit -m "Update content from feeds" git push )

Every 15 minutes. Automatically. No server to maintain.

What I Gained

Ownership — Every post exists as a markdown file in my repository. If GitHub disappears tomorrow, I have local copies. If Substack changes their terms, my content is already elsewhere.

Durability — HTML and markdown are the cockroaches of file formats. They'll survive every framework cycle, every JavaScript fatigue wave, every new paradigm.

Speed — Static files served from GitHub Pages. No database queries. No cold starts. Just bytes over the wire.

Simplicity — The entire system is three JavaScript files with zero dependencies. I can read every line and understand what it does.

What I Kept

Substack for writing — The editor is good. The email delivery works. The community exists. I don't need to rebuild what's already solved.

Comments and discussion — They happen on the original Substack post. The attribution link at the bottom of each post takes readers there.

Email subscriptions — Substack handles this. I don't need another service to manage.

The Philosophy

There's a quote I keep coming back to: "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now."

I can't go back and own my content from the beginning. But I can start now. Every post from this point forward lives in two places: where it's convenient and where I control it.

The infrastructure took an afternoon to build. The markdown files will last decades.

That's the trade I'm making.

The code for this system is open source at github.com/peterskaronis/peterskaronis.github.io