Build a Blog with Antenna

By R. S. Doiel, 2025-09-05

Antenna is a feed-oriented content management tool. This tutorial walks through building a simple blog: configuring the blog, posting content in Markdown, generating HTML pages and an RSS feed, and adding supporting static pages.

Setting up

Create a directory for the website and change into it.

mkdir myblog
cd myblog

Initializing the blog

The antenna init action creates the two configuration files the blog needs.

antenna init

This produces:

antenna.yaml — the main Antenna configuration (collections, base URL, htdocs path)
page.yaml — the HTML page generator (stylesheet links, nav, header, footer, scripts)

After initializing, generate a default stylesheet. This writes css/site.css with sensible typography, dark-mode support, navigation styles, and the skip-navigation link required for keyboard accessibility. It also adds the stylesheet reference to page.yaml.

antenna css

Defining the blog collection

A blog is built from three things:

Markdown files holding individual posts
An HTML page listing posts in reverse chronological order
An RSS feed of recent posts

These are managed inside an Antenna collection. A collection is defined by a Markdown file whose front matter and body describe the collection itself. The collection’s name determines the output filenames — index.md produces index.html, index.xml, and index.opml.

Create index.md with this content:

---
title: My Blog
description: A simple blog built with Antenna App.
---

# Welcome to My Blog

Posts appear below in reverse chronological order.

Add it to Antenna once:

antenna add index.md

This creates index.db (the SQLite3 database that tracks posts) and, if needed, updates page.yaml.

Adding the first post

Posts live in a date-based directory tree under a blog/ folder. For a post on September 5, 2025:

mkdir -p blog/2025/09/05

On Windows:

New-Item -ItemType Directory -Force -Path blog\2025\09\05

Create blog/2025/09/05/welcome.md. The required front matter fields are title, postPath, and pubDate:

---
title: Welcome
description: The first post on my new blog.
author: Your Name
keywords:
  - welcome
  - announcement
pubDate: "2025-09-05"
postPath: "blog/2025/09/05/welcome.html"
---

# Welcome

This is a demonstration of blogging with Antenna App.

The title, description, author, and keywords fields are written into the generated HTML as <meta> elements, which search engines and the PageFind site-search index can use.

Post it to the index.md collection:

antenna post index.md blog/2025/09/05/welcome.md

On Windows, use backslash paths for the Markdown file argument.

Antenna generates blog/2025/09/05/welcome.html and records the post in index.db.

Now rebuild the collection page and RSS feed:

antenna generate

Preview the result at http://localhost:8000:

antenna preview

Updating a post

Re-run antenna post on the same file to update it. Antenna matches by postPath and overwrites the record:

antenna post index.md blog/2025/09/05/welcome.md
antenna generate
antenna preview

Listing posts, pages, and items

Check what Antenna has recorded at any time:

# Blog posts in the index.md collection
antenna posts index.md

# Static pages (tracked separately in pages.db)
antenna pages

# All items in a collection, including harvested feed items
antenna items index.md

# All defined collections
antenna list

Adding static pages

Static pages — an About page, a contact page, a series index — are Markdown files that are not part of any post collection. Use antenna page to render them:

---
title: About
description: About the author of this blog.
author: Your Name
---

# About

I write about technology and other things I find interesting.

Save as about.md and render it:

antenna page about.md

This generates about.html next to about.md and records it in the pages database. Re-run antenna page about.md whenever about.md changes.

Front matter metadata

Every front matter field in a post or page is written into the generated HTML <head> as a standard <meta name="…" content="…"> element and a matching data-pagefind-filter attribute for PageFind faceted search. Common useful fields:

Field	Purpose
`title`	Sets the `<title>` element; not emitted as a `<meta>`
`description`	Short summary for search engines
`author`	Author name
`keywords`	List of tags; each value gets its own `<meta>` pair
`series`	Series name for multi-part posts
`seriesNumber`	Position in the series
`datePublished`	Publication date (`YYYY-MM-DD`)
`dateModified`	Last-modified date

Controlling which fields are published

By default all front matter fields are emitted as metadata. If some fields are internal (build flags, workflow notes) you can restrict publication to an explicit allowlist in page.yaml:

allowed_meta_fields:
  - title
  - author
  - keywords
  - description
  - series
  - seriesNumber

When allowed_meta_fields is set, only those keys appear in the generated HTML; all other front matter fields are silently omitted.

Enhancing the blog

Open page.yaml and customise the HTML shell. The antenna css command already added the stylesheet link; here is a fuller example:

lang: en-US

link:
  - rel: stylesheet
    type: text/css
    href: /css/site.css

header: |
  <h1>My Blog</h1>

nav: |
  <ul>
    <li><a href="/">Home</a></li>
    <li><a href="/about.html">About</a></li>
  </ul>

footer: |
  <p>© 2025 Your Name</p>

lang sets the lang attribute on the <html> element. Change it for non-English sites (e.g. lang: fr-FR, lang: ja).

The nav HTML is wrapped in <nav aria-label="Site navigation"> automatically. The page already includes a skip to main content link before the nav for keyboard accessibility — the css/site.css generated by antenna css hides it off-screen until it receives keyboard focus.

After editing page.yaml, re-post and regenerate:

antenna post index.md blog/2025/09/05/welcome.md
antenna generate
antenna preview

Publishing

When the blog looks right in preview, publish to your host using whatever tool it provides. For GitHub Pages:

git add -A
git commit -m "Initial blog posts"
git push origin main

Happy blogging!