How to write blog posts in Coding Capybaras

The blog you're reading is part of the Coding Capybaras boilerplate. Every deploy ships with it. This post walks through how to publish your own posts — the same way this site does it.

The pattern

Coding Capybaras uses a file-based MDX blog:

• Posts live as .mdx files in website/content/blog/
• Each file's name (minus the .mdx) becomes its URL slug — my-first-post.mdx becomes /blog/my-first-post
• Frontmatter at the top drives SEO, listing order, and publish state
• The body is markdown (with MDX extensions if you want them)

No database. No admin GUI. No CMS to keep updated. Posts are version-controlled with the rest of your code, and a git push is your publish action.

This is intentional. The boilerplate is built for founders using AI coding tools — Claude Code, Cursor, Cowork. Your AI assistant writes a post, saves it as a file, commits it. There's no admin form to wrestle with.

The frontmatter

Every post has a YAML frontmatter block at the top.

Required fields:

• title — the post title (also used as the <h1>)
• description — short summary (used as <meta description> for SEO and on the index)
• date — publish date in YYYY-MM-DD format

Optional fields:

• author — defaults to your site name if omitted
• tags — array of tag strings (no tag index pages yet, but the frontmatter is captured)
• updated — date of last update; appears in JSON-LD as dateModified
• published — defaults to true. Set to false to keep a draft from appearing on the index or sitemap

The build fails on malformed frontmatter — intentional, so broken posts can never silently deploy.

Writing the body

Standard markdown. Use ## and ### for section headings (your title is the page's only <h1>). Bold, italic, inline code, and links all work. Fenced code blocks render with syntax highlighting:

function example() {
  return "hello, world";
}

Lists, blockquotes, and tables all work as expected.

Publishing

1. Create a new .mdx file in website/content/blog/
2. Add the frontmatter and body
3. git commit and git push
4. Vercel auto-deploys
5. Your post is live at /blog/your-slug and added to your sitemap

From draft to live in about 60 seconds.

What ships for SEO

Every post automatically gets:

• A <title> and <meta description> populated from frontmatter
• Open Graph tags (og:type=article, published/modified times, author)
• Twitter card metadata
• JSON-LD Article schema with publisher = your branding's legal entity name
• A canonical URL
• Inclusion in your sitemap.xml

You don't have to configure any of it — it ships in the boilerplate.

What's next

Obvious extensions for when you outgrow v1:

• RSS / Atom feed at /blog/feed.xml
• Tag index pages at /blog/tags/[tag]
• Pagination on the index page
• Cover images and dynamic OG image generation
• Custom MDX components (callouts, embeds)

None ship in v1 — deliberately deferred until there's a real need.

Happy writing.