Claire Daily — A Site I Design, Build and Run

Context

Claire Daily is my own writing site — where I publish a weekly newsletter and travel-log notes without depending on a platform I don’t control. I run the whole thing: content model, templates, design system, and deployment.

What I built

The design goal was that publishing should cost almost nothing once the system was in place.

Auto-indexing archive — the archive, the category pages and the “latest post” block on the homepage are all generated from the posts folder with Liquid loops (group_by_exp). Adding a post means dropping one Markdown file in _posts/; every listing updates itself, with no links to edit by hand.
A documented design system — colours, type and spacing live in one CSS file backed by a written brand spec, not scattered ad-hoc values. Every text/background pairing is checked against WCAG AA contrast before it ships.
Separation of source and output — drafts and private docs are excluded from both the repo and the build, so the published site only ever contains what’s meant to be public.

Iteration

The site reached “drop a file and forget it” in stages, each one removing a manual step.

v1Static listsEarly on, each year and category page listed its posts by hand — every new post meant editing several files, exactly the kind of chore that doesn't get done.

v2Dynamic indexingRewrote the listings as Liquid loops grouped by year, so posts appear everywhere automatically. Publishing dropped to a single file drop.

v3Design system passReplaced an ad-hoc palette with a documented one — a calm, readable identity with every colour pairing verified against WCAG AA, plus web fonts with a safe fallback chain so Chinese text never drops to a system serif.

Migration

Partway through I moved hosting from GitHub Pages to Cloudflare Pages, and the site onto a dedicated subdomain. Deployment is now push-to-build: a commit to main triggers Cloudflare’s build, with no separate deploy step. DNS lives on Cloudflare, and the old platform’s custom-domain artefact was removed once the new setup was handling everything — a clean cut rather than two half-configured hosts.

Outcome

Publishing a post is one file and one push. The site is live at blog.clairedaily.com, and the conventions behind it — content model, palette, deploy flow — are written down as a working spec, so the system stays maintainable instead of living only in my head.