Long Tran Lab
My personal research notebook — a public knowledge garden built with Astro and deployed on Cloudflare Pages.
Overview
This site is itself a project. Building and maintaining a public knowledge repository is a long-term engineering and writing practice.
Motivation
Most personal sites are portfolios or traditional blogs. I wanted something closer to a research notebook — a place where notes can be rough, research can be ongoing, and the site grows incrementally with learning rather than being designed upfront.
The goal is to build a long-term knowledge repository that compounds over time, not a short-lived blog that fades as motivation wanes.
Architecture
Built with Astro 6 — a static site generator that makes content-first sites fast and simple. Key choices:
- Markdown + MDX for all content. No CMS, no editor. Text files in a git repo.
- Four content collections — notes, research, talks, projects — each with their own schema and index page.
- Tailwind CSS for styling. No design system, no component library. Utility-first keeps it simple.
- Cloudflare Pages for hosting. Zero config, global CDN, generous free tier.
- GitHub as the CMS.
git pushto deploy.
Features
- Dark mode (system default + manual toggle, persisted in localStorage)
- Full-text search (client-side, no external service)
- Tag system with auto-generated tag pages
- RSS feed across all collections
- Sitemap and Open Graph for SEO
Lessons Learned
Constraints enable creativity. Deciding “no CMS, no editor” forced a simpler, faster workflow. The friction of opening a complex publishing tool was a reason not to write. The friction of opening a text editor is not.
Ship early, improve over time. The first version of this site was the Astro blog template with renamed collections. Ship that, write content, then improve the design. Design without content is design for an imaginary user.
The site structure is a writing system. The four content types (notes, research, talks, projects) are not just categories — they define what kind of writing is worth doing. Having a place for short rough notes makes short rough notes more likely to be written.