I wanted a blog that lives with my code—no plugin zoo, no surprise branding. Blogger was fine but not me. WordPress wasn’t a fit. Ghost was 95% perfect, but their branding in verification emails kept returning after updates. I wanted control, consistency, and speed.

So I built it:

• Clean admin UI with tags, drafts, and scheduled posts

• I paste Markdown in the UI; it stores the Markdown and pre-renders HTML in the DB

• Vanilla HTML/CSS/JS on the front, .NET backend, Clerk for auth, Docker for deploy

• Built over a weekend by keeping it boring and straightforward

Mistakes I made (so you don’t): I prompted like it was a React app (it wasn’t), let Program.cs get thicc, and skipped a local Docker test before going live. Fixed now. Future me will refactor the plumbing and keep the structure tight.

Full post (canonical): https://coderbdev.com/blog

I wanted a blog that lives with my code—no plugin zoo, no surprise branding. Blogger was fine but not me. WordPress wasn’t a fit. Ghost was 95% perfect, but their branding in verification emails kept returning after updates. I wanted control, consistency, and speed.