{ "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1.1", "title": "cairn.pub", "description": "cairn's own site: the Waymark template wearing the cairn theme, managed by cairn's own admin.", "home_page_url": "https://cairn.pub", "feed_url": "https://cairn.pub/feed.json", "items": [ { "id": "https://cairn.pub/posts/how-this-site-works", "url": "https://cairn.pub/posts/how-this-site-works", "title": "How this site works", "summary": "A tour of cairn.pub as a deployment: one Worker, markdown in git, a live admin.", "date_published": "2026-07-18T00:00:00.000Z", "content_html": "

This site is the thing it describes, so it makes a decent tour of what a cairn deployment actually is.

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The site itself is a Waymark scaffold in a single repository, the same starting point the tutorial produces, consuming @glw907/cairn-cms from npm. The content model is the stock set, deliberately unmodified: Posts (this page is one), Pages (the home page is one), and the embedded-only Fragments they can share. What’s composed rather than stock is the routing. The home page’s route pulls a Pages entry and the latest posts through the same delivery exports any site gets, and the blog receives the template’s archive; the point of the arrangement is that a site can rearrange cairn’s pieces without touching its internals.

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The whole thing, public pages and admin both, deploys as one Cloudflare Worker. Beside it sit three stores: a D1 database for the editor list and sign-in sessions, an R2 bucket for media bytes, and the git repository, which holds every word. The sign-in email goes out through Cloudflare’s Email Sending. There is no server anywhere, and no content database; the markdown files are the content. One screen in the admin, Signups, isn’t cairn’s at all: it’s a custom screen mounted through the extending seam, reading its own separate database, there to show where a real site’s domain features go.

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The editor at /admin is not a demo. Posts like this one are written in it, saved as private drafts, and published from it, and each publish becomes a commit in the site’s repository through a GitHub App, authored in the writer’s name. A deploy then carries it live. When something needs investigating, the engine’s structured logs name each auth and publish event, queryable from the Cloudflare dashboard.

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The chrome you’re reading, serif headings and warm paper, is the cairn theme over neutral Waymark; the previous post tells that story. And the /help pages serve more than this site: they’re the standing editor orientation a cairn site’s developer can point their admin’s support contact at.

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That’s the deployment. A more precise version of everything above lives in the docs, and the tutorial that builds one from an empty directory is Build your first cairn site.

", "tags": [ "engineering" ] }, { "id": "https://cairn.pub/posts/waymark-and-the-cairn-theme", "url": "https://cairn.pub/posts/waymark-and-the-cairn-theme", "title": "Waymark and the cairn theme", "summary": "Why cairn’s starter template went neutral, and where its identity moved.", "date_published": "2026-07-17T00:00:00.000Z", "content_html": "

Waymark didn’t start out neutral. The first version of cairn’s starter template shipped wearing the project’s own identity: a display serif called Fraunces, paper with a warm tint, a handful of typographic gestures in the prose. It looked good, and that was the problem. A starter template is the beginning of somebody else’s site, and a template with a strong identity gets adopted whole; six months later a dozen sites all look like the demo, because replacing the look is work their owners never got around to.

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So the template was neutralized on purpose. What ships now is a humanist sans on plain paper, complete but quiet: the layout, the archive, the components, the reading surface, all present, none of them insisting on a personality. The identity didn’t disappear, though. It moved into one file.

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That file is the cairn theme, and this site wears it. Applying it is an import line:

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@import './theme.css';\n@import './cairn.css';\n
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The serif headings, the warm paper, the way pull quotes sit in the text: all of it comes from that one stylesheet. Delete the line and this becomes the stock template again, unchanged everywhere else.

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\"The
The same Waymark site, shown neutral and with the cairn theme’s one added CSS file.
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The arrangement is the restyle story told as a working example rather than a promise. Waymark’s surfaces read every color and size from tokens in one theme.css, so a re-skin edits tokens instead of hunting through components, and in the template’s own CI two gates hold the seam: one fails the build if a literal color sneaks onto the public surface, and one proves every shipped pairing clears the WCAG AA contrast floor, in both sRGB and display-P3.

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Your site will not look like this one unless you want it to. Start at the Waymark page, see the neutral template, and read the restyle guide with the cairn theme open beside it as the worked example.

", "tags": [ "design" ] } ] }