Publishing a note

From a blank file to a live page, without opening anything that calls itself a dashboard.

Claude Code + Zola + Cloudflare Pages

Updated September 20, 2026

Every note on this site goes up the same way. There’s no login anywhere in it.

The steps

1. Make a file in content/logs/ named YYYY-MM-DD-some-slug.md. The date in the filename becomes the date in the URL.
2. Put the frontmatter at the top — title, date, slug, a one-line summary, and any workflows the log points at. The slug repeats the filename on purpose: without it Zola strips the date out of the URL, and I want the date in the address.
3. Write the note.
4. Run zola serve and look at it on a phone-width window before anything else.
5. Commit and push. The site rebuilds itself.

The frontmatter

Everything between the +++ markers. Only title and date are required:

+++
title = "What I did today"
date = 2026-09-20
slug = "2026-09-20-what-i-did-today"
draft = false
[extra]
summary = “One line that shows up in the feed.”
workflows = [“publishing-a-note”]
+++

Set draft = true and it stays off the site until you change it.

Images

Images go inside the writing, never at the top of a post. There is no post image anywhere in this site and nothing will ever ask me for one.

Make the log a folder instead of a file — content/logs/2026-09-20-slug/index.md — and drop the images in beside it. Reference them by filename alone.

A scan of something handwritten keeps its own shape rather than being cropped:

A scan or a drawing keeps its own proportions instead of being cropped into a rectangle:

{{ <figure src="journal-page.jpg" kind="scan" caption="the page I worked from" /> }}

Linking notes and workflows

A note lists the workflows it used. This page then finds those notes on its own and lists them underneath — nothing to maintain on this end.