Klytron.com — Laravel 13 Portfolio with Zero-Database CMS

Overview: "Eating My Own Cooking"

The most honest demonstration of a developer's skill is the system they build for themselves, where there's no client brief to hide behind and no corner-cutting when the deadline looms.

Klytron.com is a full-featured personal portfolio and blog built on Laravel 13 — and the engineering decision that defines it is deliberate: no database for content. Every blog post, portfolio item, service page, and site configuration lives as Markdown files with YAML frontmatter. The database constraint was exercised — and rejected.

This isn't a static site generator. It's a fully dynamic Laravel application with content routing, RSS/Atom/JSON feeds, XML sitemap generation, schema.org structured data, OpenSearch support, and zero-downtime atomic deployments via Deployer.

Why No Database?

The instinct for most Laravel developers is to reach for Eloquent and migrations. For a content site with infrequent writes and high read frequency, a flat-file architecture is simply superior in every dimension that matters:

The trade-off is write performance (which doesn't matter for a personal site updated a few times a week) and query flexibility (which is unnecessary when content categories map directly to directories).

Content Architecture — The ContentService

The heart of the system is ContentService — a singleton that parses, caches, and serves Markdown content throughout the application.

// ContentService — core pattern (simplified)
public function get(string $path): array
{
    return Cache::lock("content.{$path}", 5)->block(2, function () use ($path) {
        return Cache::remember("content.{$path}", now()->addHour(), function () use ($path) {
            return $this->parse($path);
        });
    });
}

Key design decisions:

• Atomic locking via Cache::lock prevents cache stampede under concurrent requests
• 1-hour TTLs balance freshness with performance — a ddev artisan cache:clear on deploy handles invalidation
• YAML frontmatter is parsed with the Spatie YAML Front Matter package and content is rendered via League CommonMark with GFM extension
• Collections over arrays throughout — ContentService::all() returns a Collection for clean chaining

SEO & Discovery Layer

The site implements the complete modern SEO stack:

• /sitemap.xml — dynamically generated from all published content files
• /robots.txt — route-served from PageController, fully configurable
• /feed/posts — Atom feed with full-text content
• /feed/posts/rss — RSS 2.0 feed
• /feed/posts/json — JSON Feed 1.1
• /opensearch.xml — OpenSearch description document for browser search plugin integration
• Schema.org JSON-LD — injected per page type (Article, Person, WebSite, Service)
• Dynamic OG images — server-side generated via OgImageController using PHP GD with branded background

All feed URLs use the production domain from config/site.php, keeping localhost test feed URLs out of production XML.

Design System

The UI is a dark-mode-only glassmorphic design built on Bootstrap 5 with heavy CSS customisation compiled via Vite. Key design tokens:

• Primary: #62a92b — a deliberate choice against the generic blue/purple palette SaaS floods use
• Glassmorphism: backdrop-filter: blur() cards with rgba borders and ambient green glow accents
• Typography: DM Mono — both primary and secondary font

Custom Components:

• Mac-style terminal windows for all code blocks (CSS + JavaScript, no dependencies)
• Dynamic Table of Contents auto-generated from post headings via vanilla JS
• Sticky sidebars on all detail pages for metadata and sharing
• Reading progress bar on blog posts
• Global command palette (⌘K) with AJAX-powered search

Deployment Pipeline

Zero-downtime atomic deployments using Deployer (php-deployment-kit):

git push → GitHub → SSH trigger → Deployer
  → composer install (no-dev)
  → npm run build
  → php artisan config:cache
  → php artisan route:cache  
  → php artisan view:cache
  → atomic symlink swap
  → php artisan cache:clear

The symlink swap is instantaneous — requests that arrived mid-deploy see either the old or new release, never a broken intermediate state. Rollback to the previous release is a single dep rollback command.

Technology Stack