Every "simple" blog wants a static-site generator, its templating language, a build, and a deploy to babysit. zero-build-blog is the smallest thing that skips all of it: write a Markdown file, git push, and GitHub Pages serves a site that renders itself. The repo is the website — it runs blog.zosc.com.
What you get
- No build step — no Hugo, Jekyll or Astro, no
node_modules, no CI. A small vanilla-JS engine does the rendering in the browser. - Auto index and prev/next — drop a post folder in and it appears on the home page, newest first; there's no list to maintain.
- Comments through GitHub Discussions via Giscus, with no third-party tracker.
- Dark mode that follows the system theme, syntax highlighting, and per-post images with relative links.
- You own everything — plain Markdown in a Git repo, no database, no lock-in.
How it works: the home page lists posts by reading the repo's posts/ folder through the public GitHub API, and each article's Markdown is fetched and rendered client-side with marked, DOMPurify and highlight.js. That's the whole trick — the data source is the Git repo itself. The engine is MIT-licensed; the writing stays its author's.