A landing page before a launch

The website went up today. The product is months from a public release. That sequence is on purpose.

At the root of forestlynk.com, a single page explains what we’re building and why. Below the page, a mailing list for anyone who wants a note when we get closer to opening. Off to the side, this dev blog.

The forestlynk.com landing page on the day it went up — hero copy on the left, branching diagram on the right with chronicle, DM canvas and constellation vignettes anchored to the root node. — The pre-launch landing page — mailing-list signup and a sketch of what's coming

Why a page before there’s anything to open

The domain had to be claimed, and a parked placeholder was always going to look worse than a real page. The mailing list lets anyone who finds us early put their hand up, so the people in the room on day one are the ones who already cared. And the dev blog exists because the product is taking shape in plain sight, and we’d rather write about it as we go than scramble for a narrative afterwards.

The shape we chose

A few static pages and a markdown content collection for posts. No frameworks at runtime, no servers we operate, no database on the website side. The dev blog you’re reading is a folder of markdown files committed to a git repo; the index is generated at build time. The whole thing is small enough to redeploy in seconds.

The DM canvas vignette on the right of the hero is the actual interactive design prototype — it breathes in real time. The chronicle vignette next to it is a hand-drawn React mock; real screenshots from the current build still have layout bugs we’d rather not apologise for. The constellation below is a real screenshot. A mixed surface, on purpose.

The product, when it ships

A separate post.

Tech notes

The site is built with Astro and hosted on Cloudflare Pages.

Astro is a web framework built around the islands architecture pattern. Pages render to plain HTML by default, and any interactive piece on the page is treated as an “island” that hydrates independently in the browser. The framework itself is component-agnostic — a project can mix React, Svelte, Vue, or Solid components in the same file — but the default output is HTML and CSS only, with no framework runtime shipped to the client unless a specific component opts in via a client:* directive (client:load, client:visible, client:idle). The trade-off versus something like Next.js, which ships React’s runtime on every page whether or not anything is interactive, is that a content-heavy site loads in a fraction of the bytes.

Astro was created by Fred Schott and the team behind the Pika/Snowpack tooling; the 1.0 release shipped in August 2022. In January 2026, the Astro Technology Company joined Cloudflare. The framework’s content collections feature — what the dev blog you’re reading is built on — gives type-safe access to a folder of Markdown / MDX files, with a Zod schema validating frontmatter at build time. Each post is just a .md or .mdx file in a folder; the build pipeline validates, generates static HTML, and produces the index automatically.

The landing page itself is mostly the same shape: a single static Astro page with the hero copy, the mailing-list form, and the branching diagram. The one moving piece — the DM canvas vignette breathing on the right of the hero — is a React component hydrated as an island, so it can animate in the browser while the rest of the page stays inert HTML served straight from the CDN.

Cloudflare Pages is Cloudflare’s static-site hosting product. Deploys happen from a Git push or via wrangler pages deploy <dir>, and the build output is served from Cloudflare’s edge CDN — around three hundred points of presence worldwide, behind automatic HTTPS. Preview deploys spin up on any branch without configuration. The deploy itself takes seconds: the static bundle uploads, gets atomically swapped in at the edge, and is reachable globally within about a minute.

The cost story is unusual. The Cloudflare Pages free plan caps builds at 500 per month but doesn’t meter bandwidth or requests at all — no per-view charge, no overage tier, no monthly cap. Most static hosts (Vercel, Netlify) meter bandwidth on their free plans at 100 GB / month and pause sites that exceed it. Cloudflare can offer unlimited bandwidth because they own the CDN they’re serving from — they aren’t paying egress fees to a third party per request. At any plausible traffic for a pre-launch site, the marginal cost is effectively zero.