Hello, blog — building a fast static-feel blog with PHP and Markdown

Welcome to the new blog on nzian.xyz. This first post explains why it exists, how it's built, and what kind of writing you can expect here.

#Why a blog (and why now)

I've been freelancing on Laravel + Vue + WordPress projects for years. Most of what I learn ends up in scattered notes, Slack DMs, and chat threads with AI assistants. A blog is the obvious place to consolidate.

Three goals:

1. Write things down once. If I solve a tricky bug, the writeup helps the next person who hits it (often: future me).
2. Show how I work — including how I lean on AI tools and platforms as part of my workflow (more on that on /my-team).
3. Pull better clients. SEO + concrete writeups beat a generic portfolio.

#How this blog is built

The whole site is static HTML served by Caddy. I didn't want to bolt on WordPress or a JS framework just for a blog. So I went minimal:

• Posts live in Markdown files with YAML front-matter, stored outside the web root at /var/lib/nzian-blog/posts/. Web users physically cannot read them; only the www-data user can.
• A small PHP entry point (/blog/index.php) parses front-matter, renders Markdown to HTML using league/commonmark, and writes the result to a server-side cache file.
• Subsequent requests serve the cached HTML directly. Editing the source .md invalidates the cache automatically (mtime check).
• Tailwind handles styling. The prose plugin makes Markdown look good with no extra CSS.

// pseudocode
$post = $blog->getPost($slug);
echo $cache->getOrRender($post, fn() => $renderer->render($post));

#What you'll find here

• Build journals — real problems I'm solving on client projects, with code.
• Tooling notes — what works, what didn't, why I switched.
• Career posts — the freelancing-from-Bangladesh angle.

If a topic helps you, subscribe to the newsletter and I'll send the next one.

Thanks for reading.