Forge & Fable

Look, every developer has a personal site. This is mine.

The last one went stale. Not because I stopped doing things worth putting on it — I just stopped wanting to deal with adding them. Updating it was enough of a chore that it wasn't worth the effort, so nothing got added, and eventually it stopped reflecting anything real about what I was actually working on.

This time I wanted to fix that properly. Not just build something nicer to look at, but build something where the content takes care of itself. Work on a project, push it. It should just appear. I shouldn't have to think about the site at all.

Around the same time I was getting properly into GitHub Actions — CI/CD, automated pipelines. And it seemed like exactly the right tool for the problem. The site is built in Blazor Server and pulls live content from three separate headless CMSes: one for programming projects, one for physical builds, one for creative writing. None of them share a database. None of them need to. Each one generates a JSON manifest on push, publishes it to a GitHub release, and the site fetches it over the CDN at runtime. Four repositories, loosely coupled, each doing one thing.

If the design needs a refresh in a few years, the content layer stays untouched. If I want to add a new section, it's a new repo and a new manifest endpoint. It's a bit over-engineered for a personal site — but it's not over-engineered for the problem.

The colour palette came from the writing side of things — volcanic landscapes, dark basalts, muted greens. It felt right to let the creative work bleed into the design a little.

The CMS layer

Each content area has its own repository and its own manifest pipeline. They share the same structural pattern but are otherwise completely independent.

graph LR
    subgraph "CMS Layer — publishes on commit"
        P[PS-CMS-Programming]
        B[PS-CMS-Builds]
        W[PS-CMS-Writing]
    end

    P -->|manifest| CDN[(GitHub CDN)]
    B -->|manifest| CDN
    W -->|manifest + content| CDN

    CDN -->|"pulled at runtime, on user request"| S[Forge & Fable]

• Programming CMS — programming projects and utilities
• Builds CMS — CAD work and physical builds
• Writing CMS — creative writing, world-building, and generated artefacts