# A static blog that translates its own URLs into eight languages

> Static Astro on Cloudflare Workers, with posts translated into eight languages by a GitHub Action.

- Source: https://jays.fyi/blog/hello-world
- Author: Jay Derinbogaz
- Published: 2026-08-07
- Language: en
- Tags: meta, astro, cloudflare
- Reading time: 2 min

---

This is the first post, so it may as well explain the machine that published
it. The whole site is static files — there is no server, no database, and
nothing to keep running.

## Writing a post

Drop a markdown file into `src/content/blog/en/`. The filename becomes the
URL, so `how-i-removed-greptile.md` publishes at `/blog/how-i-removed-greptile`.
The frontmatter is short:

```yaml
---
title: How I removed Greptile
description: One sentence for search results and social cards.
pubDate: 2026-08-07
tags: [tooling, code-review]
---
```

Set `draft: true` while you're still working on it. Drafts render in
`npm run dev` but are left out of the build.

## Translation

When a post lands on `main`, a GitHub Action sends it to DeepSeek V4 Flash and
writes eight translations back into the repo as ordinary markdown files. The
slug gets translated too, so the Turkish version of this post lives at a
Turkish URL rather than an English one bolted onto a `/tr` prefix.

Each translated file records a hash of the English source it came from. On the
next run, posts whose hash still matches are skipped — so editing one post
re-translates one post, not the whole archive.

| Layer | Choice |
| --- | --- |
| Framework | Astro, static output |
| Hosting | Cloudflare Workers static assets |
| Translation | DeepSeek V4 Flash on Fireworks |
| Content | Markdown in git |

## Deployment

Merging to `main` runs the translation pass, commits whatever changed, builds,
and deploys. The build is a few seconds and the output is a folder of HTML.

> The nicest property of a static site is that the failure modes are boring.
> Nothing can fall over at 3am, because there is nothing running.

Press `T` to flip between light and dark, and `B`, `A`, `G` or `L` to jump
around the site.