Indie Blog Starter Kit

Clone it at 6pm.
Publish by 7pm.

A minimal Astro starter that gets you from nothing to a live post on your own domain in under an hour. No CMS. No decisions. No afternoon wasted configuring something that never launches.

Buy for $19

One-time payment. No subscription.

What the first hour looks like

Download and unzip the kit into a new directory
Open site.config.ts. Set your name, URL, and a one-line description. Close the file.
Create your first post: posts/2026-04-27-hello-world.md. Add a title, a date, a description. Write a few sentences.
Push to GitHub. Netlify picks it up — netlify.toml is already configured.
You have a blog. On your domain. With an RSS feed. In one hour.

That's not a simplified version of the process. That's the whole process.

What's in the kit

3-field frontmatter Title, date, description. No more fields than you need to start writing.
Date-in-filename convention 2026-04-27-my-post.md. Posts sort naturally. No database.
RSS, first-class Linked from the header, footer, and every post. Full content in the feed — subscribers read without clicking through.
Zero client-side JavaScript No hydration. No bundles. Pages load fast because there's nothing extra to load.
Single CSS file System fonts. 65ch reading width. Nothing to configure before you can publish.
site.config.ts One file to make it yours. Name, URL, description. That's it.
netlify.toml included Push to GitHub, connect to Netlify, done. No build settings to figure out.
Open Graph tags on every page Posts look right when shared. No plugin to install.
about.md Your about page is a markdown file. Edit it like any other post.

How this kit thinks

Tags are a procrastination tool.: You spend an afternoon designing a taxonomy for posts that don't exist yet. This kit has no tags. Write first. Organize never, if you want.
RSS is the distribution model.: No algorithm. No platform. Readers subscribe to your feed and get everything you publish. That's it. The feed ships full content so subscribers never need to click through to read.
Friction is the enemy of publishing.: The more steps between "I have something to say" and "it's live," the less you publish. This kit is two steps: write the file, push the commit.
Own your URL. Own your archive.: Nothing here depends on a platform staying alive, a free tier persisting, or a company's roadmap. The files are yours. The domain is yours. The feed is yours.

This is not for you if…

You want a rich text editor or a CMS login
You need to design a category taxonomy before you write anything
You're building a multi-author publication
You want algorithmic discovery or social sharing built in
You need image uploaders, scheduled posts, or a dashboard to manage drafts

If any of those are hard requirements, this kit will frustrate you. Buy something else.

The decisions are already made. The config is already written. All that's left is the part only you can do.