Background

I have used C# and Razor (cshtml) extensively and have always enjoyed the experience. Blazor largely replaced the classic MVC/Razor model, but its ecosystem still feels limited compared to React or Angular - fewer quality libraries and awkward integration with existing JavaScript tooling. But that is a topic for another post.

What I Wanted

I wanted a file-system-based blogging platform with the following properties:

• Markdown for post content, YAML for metadata
• Extensible via new .cshtml templates and C# model classes
• JSON Schema validation for YAML files, so editors provide IntelliSense and catch type mismatches early
• Case-insensitive URLs
• Generated HTML with proper metadata tags for search engines
• A development mode that watches for file changes and regenerates the static output automatically

No existing tool matched all of these requirements.

Building It

Over a weekend, I built exactly this. The source is available at amir734jj/amir-website. If you need a lightweight blogging setup, you can drop in your own content without touching any of the infrastructure.

Under the hood it uses:

• RazorLight - Razor templates to HTML, without needing a full ASP.NET runtime
• Markdig - Markdown to HTML
• NJsonSchema - derives JSON schemas from C# classes and validates YAML against them

Why Not Jekyll or Hugo?

I tried Jekyll back in 2017. The command surface is large and the Ruby dependency chain gets in the way. Hugo is powerful but overkill for a simple Markdown blog - the configuration model alone takes time to learn.

I wanted something that gets out of my way so I can focus on writing. Paired with a small static file server and a CI pipeline that rebuilds and pushes a container image on every commit, this setup does exactly that.