It's been a bit quiet on this blog for the last couple of months, but for good reason. A lifelong dream finally came true: we packed up our belongings and moved from Boston to California.

Between finding a place to live, updating addresses, and transferring driver's licenses, the usual moving logistics kept us busy. Once we were settled, however, it was time to go explore California. And that's where we ran into a challenge.

The first two posts on this site were hand-written as individual TanStack Start routes. Fine for a quick start, but not scalable. Since I plan to share more web development tips and experiments, I needed a more flexible setup. At the same time, this is a hobby project, and I didn’t want to sink hours into building a full-fledged blogging platform. All I wanted was a simple way to write posts in Markdown and render them dynamically on my site. Here’s the approach I took.

It feels like just about every new website these days uses Tailwind CSS, and this one’s no exception. I wanted a quick way to make my articles more readable (larger text, better spacing, and so on), and it turns out Tailwind has a built-in Typography plugin. Perfect. However, I did run into one issue worth discussing.

The buzz around TanStack Start has really taken off since its recent RC release. I’ve been using it for a while (this very site runs on it!), and the latest version brings tons of improvements. One area that’s still a bit under-documented is how to configure a solid Content Security Policy (CSP) to mitigate security threats. The good news: with TanStack Start’s new middleware support, setting up CSP is now straightforward. In this post, I’ll walk through the approach I’ve been using.