A simple blog website, and whether it's enough for you
Most personal blogs need less than blogging software offers: a list of posts, a page for each, an About page and a way to follow along. Anticode can do that with posts in a CMS collection. It has no comments, no RSS feed and no scheduled posts, and those three gaps decide whether it's right for you.
What a simple blog actually needs
- A post list with title, date and a one-line summary, newest first.
- A page per post with a readable line length, clear headings and dates.
- An About page saying who writes it and what it's about.
- A way to follow: an email sign-up, an RSS feed, or both.
- Findability: sensible titles and a sitemap so search engines find new posts.
Tag clouds, related-post widgets, popular-post sidebars and share buttons are optional, and on a minimal blog site they're usually clutter. On a simple blog website, what keeps readers is posts worth reading, published often enough that the blog looks alive.
How Anticode does it
Posts live in a CMS collection with typed fields, such as title, date, summary and body, edited in the dashboard. Each post is served as its own page at /<collection>/<slug> and the collection page lists them. The rest of the site (home, About, Contact) is built from your description and edited in the visual editor or by asking for changes in a sentence.
Every published site serves its own robots.txt, sitemap.xml and llms.txt. Design-engine pages ship with no scripts at all and no third-party trackers, so they're light to load, and page views are counted per day, by source, without cookies. For a blog website without WordPress, that means no plugins to update and nothing for a visitor's browser to run.
The honest gaps
| Missing | Why it matters | What to do instead |
|---|---|---|
| Comments | Some blogs are conversations; readers expect to reply | Invite replies by email through the contact form, or link each post to a discussion elsewhere (a forum thread, a social post) |
| RSS feed | Many dedicated readers follow blogs in a feed reader | Offer an email sign-up with Mailchimp or Kit; there's no workaround for RSS itself |
| Scheduled posts | Useful if you write in batches | Write drafts outside the site and publish entries on the day |
| Tags and categories pages | Help readers browse a large archive | Use a category field and group posts by hand on index pages, or split into separate collections |
| Search box | Helps once there are hundreds of posts | Keep titles descriptive; most readers arrive from search engines anyway |
If any of the first three is essential, especially RSS for a technical audience, use dedicated blogging software and keep Anticode for other sites. If you post a few times a month and your readers mostly arrive from search or from you sharing links, the gaps rarely matter.
Writing posts people finish
- Title it with what the reader gets: "How I fixed my damp bathroom for under a weekend" rather than "Bathroom update".
- Answer the question in the first paragraph, then explain.
- Use subheadings every few paragraphs so skimmers can find their part.
- Date every post and, if it's advice, add an "updated" note when you revise it.
- End with one next step: a related post, the sign-up, or a question to email you about.
Building it
Describe the personal blog website: "a blog about restoring old bikes, with a posts collection, an About page and an email sign-up". The Architect asks up to three questions where the answer changes the build and shows a plan. Editorial (Geist) is the natural design system for long reading; Swiss or Technical for a developer blog. Publish to an anticode.dev address, or to your own domain on a paid plan so your archive keeps its address if you ever move.
Your posts aren't locked in: projects export as a self-contained HTML file or a Next.js project, and the project format, anticode.json, is open with a public schema. Whether that covers your CMS entries the way you'd want for a move is worth checking in an export before you've written hundreds of posts.
Limits
- No comments, RSS or scheduling, as above.
- No member-only posts or paywall. Everything published is public.
- No WordPress import. Bring posts over by entering them in the collection.
- No embedded videos or tweets. Link to them.
Questions people ask
Can I write posts in Markdown?
Posts are entered in the collection's fields in the dashboard. If you draft in Markdown elsewhere, paste the text into the body field.
Will new posts appear in my sitemap?
Each site serves its own sitemap. Check yours after publishing your first posts to confirm the post pages are listed.
Is it a good first blog?
For writing and publishing, yes: there's very little to configure. If you want readers to talk to each other on the site, choose blogging software with comments.