How this site was built — Mateus Nascimento

The idea was to have a simple, direct site that looks like a dev made it, with no framework and no node_modules with hundreds of folders. With that in mind, I went as basic as possible: a Node script that reads the content and generates static HTML.

All the code is open on GitHub: MNascimentoS/mnascimentos.dev.

How it works

All content lives in files:

content/site.json and content/site.en.json: projects, experience, stack and links, in Portuguese and English
content/posts/*.md: blog posts, in Markdown
content/config.json: turns the blog on or off and sets the site URL

src/build.mjs reads all of that and generates the dist/ folder with the final HTML. Zero dependencies, just Node:

npm run dev     # serves at http://localhost:4321 and reloads on save
npm run build   # generates dist/

With that, adding a project just means editing the JSON, and writing a post means creating a .md file with a simple header:

---
title: Post title
date: 2026-10-05
tags: [android]
lang: en
---

Also, if the post is about a project that already has a good README on GitHub, the README can be used directly as content:

readme: https://github.com/user/repo

Publishing

The site runs on GitHub Pages, with the mnascimentos.dev domain pointed through Cloudflare. On every git push to main, GitHub Actions runs the build and publishes dist/. It also runs once a day, in order to refresh the posts that come from a README.

git push → GitHub Actions → node src/build.mjs → GitHub Pages

What's behind it

Even though it's simple, a few things were added that make a difference:

Portuguese and English, with each page pointing to its version in the other language
SEO: sitemap, structured data (JSON-LD) and RSS for projects and the blog
Images and videos in the cards, opening in an overlay instead of a new tab
Dark theme, mono font in the headings, terminal look

In the end, adding something new comes down to editing a file and pushing, which was exactly the original goal.