Workshop Systems for the Curious
Design notes from rebuilding mayphus.org as a static-first site without losing the feeling of an active workshop.
The site should feel alive without becoming a framework science project. Static HTML, external content, and small islands of interaction are enough for most of the work.
Keep the surface calm
The public site should load as plain HTML first. The browser can enhance search filters, table-of-contents tracking, and a few stateful details later, but the reading experience cannot depend on JavaScript.
Use one route shape for a long time
Preserving /content/:slug keeps the old archive discoverable and avoids unnecessary redirect churn. Chinese content remains under /zh/:slug, with /zh/rime-config reserved before the generator itself lands.
Make redirects boring
The Cloudflare Worker only needs to solve a narrow set of problems:
- canonical slash handling
- legacy
/content/zh/*redirects - asset delivery and 404 responses
Treat content as infrastructure
The Pollen project is not just a pile of text files. It is a data source with metadata, locale boundaries, publish flags, and stable slugs. That deserves a real export step, not incidental file-globbing.