mohakash.xyz — this site

The brief

One home for several selves — developer, researcher, poet, and someone writing in public about building with Claude. The hard part wasn’t any single page; it was making four very different kinds of content feel like one coherent person rather than four stitched-together sites.

The name does the work

Mohakash — moh for Mohammed, akash for Akash — also means the infinite sky. That gave the whole thing a spine. The site reads like an open daytime sky: a light, warm off-white canvas, a faint starfield, sky-blue accents over charcoal text, bold display headlines (Anton) above a clean grotesk body (Space Grotesk). A dark “night sky” mode is one click away and remembers your choice. Bengali poetry renders in a rounded Bengali sans (Hind Siliguri), so the 55 poems don’t fall back to a mismatched system font.

Decisions I’d defend

A few choices did most of the work:

• Subdirectories, not subdomains. /poetry, /research, /projects, /blog all live in one repo and one deploy. Subdomains looked “cooler” but would have split SEO and tripled maintenance for no real benefit.
• Static by default. Built with Astro, the output is just HTML, CSS, and a little JavaScript. There’s no server to patch and no database to back up — files don’t rot, and the site loads instantly.
• Just enough JavaScript. Alpine.js handles only three things — the mobile menu, the contact form, and the blog category filter. Everything else is plain HTML.
• Content as Markdown. Every post and poem is a Markdown file in the repo, loaded through Astro’s content collections with typed frontmatter, so the data is validated at build time.

The CMS without a server

I wanted to edit from anywhere without standing up a backend. The answer was Sveltia, a git-based CMS that runs as a static admin page and commits straight to GitHub using a scoped personal access token — no OAuth server, no database. Locally it edits the repo files directly. Editing a post just makes a commit, which triggers a rebuild. Section show/hide toggles and the site’s settings (nav, socials, homepage copy) live in editable JSON, so almost everything is changeable without touching code.

Hosting and the moving parts

The site is hosted on Cloudflare Pages, which rebuilds on every push to main. The two pieces that do need a backend run as serverless functions on the same deploy:

• Contact form — a Cloudflare Pages Function that verifies a Turnstile token (spam protection) and sends the message via Resend.
• Newsletter — signups go to Kit through a small subscribe function.

One repo, one deploy, no separate server to babysit.

Findable on purpose

A site nobody can find isn’t finished. So there’s a deliberate discoverability layer: a generated sitemap, an llms.txt guide for AI assistants, a robots.txt policy that welcomes search and citation but opts out of AI training, JSON-LD structured data (a Person + WebSite graph, plus per-article schema) so search engines and AI tools can resolve “Mohammed Akash” to a clear entity, and full Open Graph / Twitter cards for link previews.

The result

A fast, quiet space that loads instantly and reads like a single considered voice — room for code, verse, and inquiry to sit side by side. And, fittingly, much of it was built in public, with Claude — which is the subject of the blog itself.