a small open-source publishing system inspired by the idea of a digital garden.
i built belantara around the same idea that drew me to Maggie Appleton’s digital garden: a website does not always have to behave like a finished brochure. it can be a place where notes, ideas, projects and unfinished things can live, grow and change over time.
belantara started as my own attempt to build that kind of personal publishing system. the early version was built around git, markdown and a CMS, with pages for notes, work, tags, links and other parts of my personal site. content was treated as something that could keep evolving rather than something that had to be published once and left alone.
this was also one of those projects i built completely by hand, before AI became part of my development workflow. the architecture, components, CMS structure and styling were all things i worked through myself. looking back at the commits is probably a better record of that process than anything i could write about it now.
years later, i came back to the project and modernised the stack: Gatsby 5, React, Tailwind CSS, PostCSS and Decap CMS. i replaced the original Bulma and Sass setup, cleaned up the Gatsby integrations and kept the original idea intact rather than turning it into something completely different.
belantara is less about the final website and more about how i thought the web could work: personal, interconnected, editable and allowed to remain unfinished.
gatsby · react · tailwind css · postcss · decap cms · netlify · markdown · git
inspired by the digital garden work of Maggie Appleton.