How these pages are made

Here's the whole flow for making a page on this site — no media library, no uploads folder, no build tools in sight:

flowchart LR
    A["✏️ Write<br/>text and images together,<br/>right in the editor"]
    A --> B["💾 Save<br/>your page is one file"]
    B --> P2["👀 Preview<br/>your own private copy of<br/>the site, always current"]
    P2 --> C["🌐 Publish<br/>one click, when it<br/>looks right"]
    C --> C2["The live site updates:<br/>fast, crawlable pages —<br/>images placed automatically"]
    B --> D["📄 Share the file itself<br/>(if you like)"]
    D --> D2["Opens in Studio,<br/>VS Code, or the<br/>web editor"]

    classDef you fill:#ffffff,stroke:#1f2328,stroke-width:2px,color:#1f2328;
    classDef auto fill:#ececec,stroke:#8b949e,stroke-width:1.5px,stroke-dasharray:5 4,color:#1f2328;
    class A,B,C,D you;
    class P2,C2,D2 auto;

Solid boxes are things you do. Grey dashed boxes happen on their own — you never touch them.

Write

Everything happens in one place. Type your text; paste or drop images right where you want them. There's no separate "media library" to upload into first — an image you use on a page simply belongs to that page and stays with it.

Save

Your page saves as one file (an .mdz — under the hood, an ordinary ZIP of Markdown and images). Because the images live inside the file, a page can never lose them: move it, rename it, email it, back it up on a USB stick — it all just works, the way a Word document does.

Preview, then publish

Saving never changes your live site. Instead, your preview — a private copy of the whole site — is always up to date with what you've saved, so you can look at any page exactly as visitors will see it, for as long as you like. Nothing goes live until you say so.

Publish is the deliberate step. It turns your saved pages into the plain, fast website the world sees: each page becomes real HTML that loads instantly and that search engines can read completely. Images are placed automatically — and if two pages happen to use the same image, it's published only once. You don't do any of this; it's what "publish" means.

And the file is still yours

Every page here ends with a "download it" note — that download is the page's source file, not an export. Open it in MDZip Studio, the VS Code extension, or the web editor and you're holding the same page, images intact. If you ever wanted to take your pages elsewhere: rename .mdz to .zip, extract, and you have plain Markdown and images any tool can read. Your content is never trapped.

Under the hood (for the curious)

The diagram above is the flow as an author experiences it, and it's the flow we hold ourselves to while building this site. The pages here really are single .mdz files — the site build unpacks each one and renders it to static HTML at publish time. Honestly, some machinery still shows: publishing currently involves a build script and a git push. Those developer steps are on our punch list — the goal is that "save" and "publish" are the only verbs an author ever needs.

One more bit of dogfooding: the flowchart at the top is a live Mermaid code fence inside the page, not an embedded image. It renders here in your browser, and again when you open the downloaded .mdz in Studio, VS Code, or the web editor.

This page renders from authoring-flow.mdz — one self-contained file. Download it, open it in the web editor, or read how these pages are made.