Marginalia
Notes on reading, software, and quiet work.

How Marginalia Is Made

February 23, 2026 · about · build · infrastructure

Marginalia is built to be simple: Markdown in, static pages out. Each essay lives in the repository as a Markdown file with a small frontmatter header. Astro turns that content into fast, pre-rendered HTML pages with an RSS feed and sitemap for search engines.

The site ships as a static bundle. A minimal AWS CDK stack deploys it to an S3 bucket behind CloudFront, keeping the origin private while the CDN serves clean URLs over HTTPS.

Everything lives in one monorepo: apps/web for the site and apps/cdk for infrastructure. If you want the full build recipe, the source is here:

https://github.com/londonbrown/marginalia