I Rebuilt My Resume Site into a Self-Hosted Blogging Platform

I rebuilt my resume website into a fully self-hosted blogging platform.

It started as: Astro + resume.json + Cloudflare Pages → just a static resume. Done.

Then it turned into:

• Posts stored in my own DB
• Custom comments (no Giscus)
• Self-built subscriptions & push notifications
• Spring Boot + Postgres + Cloudflare Tunnel
• Frontend still pure static

Yes, the counterintuitive part: I have a backend, but I keep the frontend static.

Why?

• SEO needs full content
• Fast first paint (CDN serves HTML directly)
• If the backend dies, the site still lives

Real-time updates? Don’t care. Staying alive matters more.

But static has a problem:

I hit “publish” → nothing changes

I tried:

1. Cloudflare deploy hooks → useless (I don’t use it to build)
2. SSR → too heavy, dropped it
3. Trigger GitHub Actions → ✅

Final setup:

Backend publish → trigger CI → live in seconds

The fun part: the pitfalls

• Cloudflare Bot Fight Mode → flagged my CI as a bot → build succeeded, but posts were empty

  Fix: → spoof a real browser User-Agent

• rsync without --delete

  → old classes stayed on the server → got compiled into the jar → login always returned 401

  Local worked. Production broke. Absolute nightmare.

• Web Push library

  → compiles fine → crashes at runtime

  Because: → missing BouncyCastle

What this became:

Static frontend + self-hosted backend + automated deploy + custom push

The core idea is simple:

It’s not about making it work. It’s about what still works when things break.

Now?

I hit “publish” A few seconds later, it’s live on my domain.

The entire pipeline is mine.

Feels good.