Short dated notes from the bench. 400 words max, one real number minimum.https://informalengineer.com/https://informalengineer.com/notes/2026-07-07-site-rebuild-shipped/https://informalengineer.com/notes/2026-07-07-site-rebuild-shipped/Tue, 07 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT<p>The old setup was one Ghost blog on a DigitalOcean droplet doing everything badly at once. The new setup is two static sites: stories at <a href="https://meshrahman.com">meshrahman.com</a>, procedures here.</p> <p>Numbers from the rebuild:</p> <ul> <li>2 sites, built from markdown in git, deployed to Cloudflare Pages on merge</li> <li>5 repos in the new org (sites, redirect worker, telemetry service, ops)</li> <li>20 redirect rules covering every URL the old site ever published, running in log-only mode until every destination checks out (a validation script asserts 301 to 200 on all of them before the flip)</li> <li>8 essays and 2 guides migrated to their new homes so far</li> <li>$0 per month hosting, down from a ~$12 droplet (the droplet retires after a quarantine period, snapshots verified first)</li> </ul> <p>The part nobody tells you: the actual build was the fast part. The slow part was the redirect map, because "no link dies" is a one-line principle and a multi-day audit. (Worth it. Some of those URLs have been collecting search traffic since 2022.)</p> <p>Next step: Newsletter platform decision, then the re-introduction email to the old list.</p>