Putting this blog on ATProto with standard.site

I put this blog on standard.site. Every post now also lives as a record on ATProto (the protocol behind Bluesky), and new ones publish themselves whenever I push to main.

What it is

standard.site is a set of shared ATProto lexicons. The two that matter here are site.standard.publication and site.standard.document. The publication record describes the blog: name, URL, icon. Each post becomes a document record that lives in my own data repository on a PDS and points back at the publication. To prove the records are actually mine, there's a /.well-known/site.standard.publication file on my domain and a link-rel tag in every post's HTML pointing at the matching record. The two ends point at each other, with no central registry in between.

{{< mermaid >}} sequenceDiagram participant R as Reader participant S as rednafi.com participant P as PDS

R->>S: GET /zephyr/carry-the-pager/
S-->>R: HTML + a site.standard.document link tag
R->>P: resolve that document record
P-->>R: site = publication URI, path = /zephyr/carry-the-pager/
R->>S: GET /.well-known/site.standard.publication
S-->>R: the same publication URI
Note over R: URIs match, so it's provably rednafi.com's

{{</ mermaid >}}

Why bother

Mostly the previews. Share one of my posts on Bluesky and the link turns into a card with the title, description, and image instead of a bare URL. That works because the post is a real record the network can read. Bluesky shows richer previews for standard.site links.

It goes past Bluesky, though. The records sit in my own PDS, so any reader can pick them up on its own. docs.surf already lists my posts, and a search on pckt turns them up too:

It's cheap POSSE on top of that: rednafi.com stays the canonical copy while a copy syndicates out into the ATmosphere.

Setting it up with Sequoia

I didn't hand-roll any of the ATProto plumbing. Sequoia is a CLI by Steve Simkins that does the whole thing for static sites. It doesn't much care what built yours (Hugo, Astro, Eleventy) as long as it's Markdown. If you want to put your own blog on standard.site, it goes roughly like this.

First, you need an ATProto identity, and a Bluesky account is the easy way to get one. The records live in your own PDS. Ownership is checked against a domain, so set your site's domain as your handle (mine is rednafi.com) and mint an app password for the CLI.

Then run sequoia init in the repo. It authenticates against your PDS, creates a site.standard.publication record describing the blog (name, URL, icon), and scaffolds a sequoia.json. That config is small: it points at your content directory and maps the frontmatter fields it reads, like the publish date and the slug.

That publicationUri is the at:// address of the publication record init just made. The same URI also lands in static/.well-known/site.standard.publication, so the domain and the record name each other and the ownership check holds.

Each post's HTML also needs a pointing at that post's record. sequoia inject can patch the tags into your built HTML; I emit them from my Hugo head partial instead.

With that wired up, sequoia publish walks the content, creates a site.standard.document record per post, and writes the resulting atUri back into each post's frontmatter. State lives in .sequoia-state.json, so reruns only touch what actually changed.

Making it hands-free

I didn't want to run sequoia publish by hand, so it happens in CI. Two pieces make that work.

A small Go script fills in one frontmatter field before Sequoia runs. standard.site gives each document a stable path, and Sequoia reads that from an atprotoPath field in the frontmatter. Rather than type it into every post, I derive it from the file's location and slug, so content/zephyr/carry_the_pager.md with slug: carry-the-pager gets atprotoPath: /zephyr/carry-the-pager/ written in. It also fails the build if a post has no slug to derive one from.

Then GitHub Actions does the rest on every push to main. It runs the sync script, then sequoia publish with my handle and app password from repo secrets. It prettier-formats the metadata Sequoia generated, then commits the new atUris, .sequoia-state.json, and the .well-known file back with a [skip ci] tag. Finally Hugo builds and deploys.

So my actual routine didn't change at all. Write Markdown, push to main, walk away. The ATProto side catches up by itself. This very post turned into a site.standard.document the moment the deploy ran.

Seeing it work

The previews are what I actually wanted. The card is just the record rendered, so I can put a live, clickable one right here instead of a screenshot:

{{< bskycard url="https://rednafi.com/zephyr/carry-the-pager/" image="https://blob.rednafi.com/static/images/home/cover.png" title="If you won't carry the pager, maybe don't push to mainline" description="Drive-by AI changes break the shared model a team builds around its code, and the ICs end up cleaning up the mess. Why pushing to mainline should come with the pager." date="May 30, 2026" reading="8m" publication="Redowan's Reflections" handle="rednafi.com" >}}

That same post also exists as a record on pdsls. It has the title, description, path, tags, and the full body.

If you want to copy the setup, it's all in the repo: config, script, and the ci workflow.