Outstatic CMS

I haven't posted anything here for a while, so I thought I'd give the site itself a little attention first.

This site doesn't get updated often, so I wanted something static — no server to babysit, no WordPress to keep patched. I looked at Docusaurus, Vitepress and Nextra. They all produce decent sites, but they all share the same problem: adding and editing content is a pain. Either you're editing markdown files directly on GitHub, or you layer something like TinaCMS on top, which is a nice product but has a monthly fee that I can't justify for a personal site.

What I wanted out of the shortlist:

1. Open source, ideally MIT-licensed, so I can fork it if the project ever goes quiet.
2. Free to host on something serverless like Vercel or Cloudflare. Anything that needs a dedicated server is a no for this.
3. A decent web UI for editing content, not just a text editor and git push.

Outstatic ticks all three. It's a Next.js app meant for Vercel but it runs fine anywhere. The piece that makes it different from Vitepress or Nextra is a built-in admin UI you sign into with GitHub. Any edit you make in the admin gets committed back to your repo, which triggers the deploy. There's no database.

I like the content loader it exposes — it's trivial to pull the latest posts for a home page or filter by tag without touching files directly.

A few things I'd want to add at some point:

1. Search. Nextra uses FlexSearch and that looks like a reasonable place to start. Elasticsearch and Algolia are great but more operational overhead than this site justifies.
2. Login methods other than GitHub. Fine for me personally, but at work we have people without GitHub accounts who need to edit content. Outstatic uses a GitHub app token rather than the user's own credentials to push, so in principle this should just be a matter of wiring up another identity provider.

So far this looks like the right tool for the job. outstatic.com if you want to look.