Rebuilding mayfield.io with less ceremony
I let my personal site go stale for a while. That is fine until you want to point someone at your work and the page still says “coming soon.”
When I wrote this post in April, the plan was intentionally small: a home page, resume, about page, and room for occasional notes. That part is still true for scope—it is a personal site, not a product company. What changed is that the notes did not stay occasional. The site picked up a blog, a contact page, and enough deploy checks that I trust it after a busy week.
What ships today
I rebuilt with Astro and host on Cloudflare Workers. Most pages are static HTML; a few server routes handle things like the contact form. NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day is prepared ahead of time so the home page does not call an external API on every visit (how that works).
Beyond the original handful of pages, there is now:
- A blog of fix-and-setup writeups (Astro, Cloudflare, email, deploys—the problems I hit in real projects).
- Tags and usual discoverability basics (RSS, sitemap).
- A contact form wired for production, with separate posts when something fails in prod versus locally.
The resume is still HTML first, with print-to-PDF at the top. The blog is not lifestyle content; it is notes I wanted on my own site when something broke.
Keeping it maintainable
I did not set out to build a “content machine.” I automated the repetitive parts—refreshing the home background, running the same checks before deploy, drafting posts through a review step I still own. Nothing publishes without me reading it. The architecture stayed small; the library of posts is what grew.
If you want the operational detail, other posts on this site walk through specific failures (contact form, caching, images, CI). This one is just the frame story.
Advice that still holds
If you are doing the same kind of refresh:
- Pick a stack you will actually update.
- Ship one real page at a time; delete placeholder copy.
- When production surprises you, write the fix down once.
- Automate repetition, not judgment.
The site does not need to impress anyone. It needs to be true, findable, and easy to maintain.
Where to start reading
- NASA APOD without blocking the home page
- Checklist before shipping a small personal site
- Turnstile + Resend contact form: complete setup
- Why Cloudflare Worker logs only show some routes
Hero photo: Cat Sleeping on Keyboard by Panini! (CC0).
