Welcome to Field Notes

This is the first entry in Field Notes, a small blog I keep about writing. It’s also the starting point of the Overprint tutorial, so it explains the one idea everything else rests on.

The folder is the site

Open the folder this post lives in and you can see the whole site at once:

overprint.yml
content/
  posts/
    2026-06-08-welcome-to-field-notes.md
  pages/
    about.md

That’s it. overprint.yml holds the title, the author, the theme, and the navigation. Everything under content/posts becomes an entry in the list you are reading. Everything under content/pages becomes a standalone page like About.

The files on disk are the site. There’s no database, and no copy of your writing living somewhere you can’t see. If a file is there, it gets built. Delete it and it stops existing.

Why that matters

Because you can’t lose work you can still open. These are plain Markdown files with a few lines of YAML at the top. You can open them in Overprint, in a text editor, in a terminal, on a different machine ten years from now. Put the folder in a git repository and you get version history for free. Put it in a synced folder and you can write on either computer.

And anything can edit them. Overprint is a comfortable place to write, but it isn’t the only door into this folder. A script can add a post; so can you, in whatever editor you already have open. You’re not asking an app for permission to touch your own prose.

Running this site

From the folder, start the local preview:

overprint serve

That builds the site into dist/ and serves it at http://localhost:4321. It builds once, so restart it after a round of edits. The app watches the folder and reloads its preview as you type, which is the nicer way to write. For a build with no server, use overprint build.

Never edit anything inside dist/. It is generated output, and the next build will overwrite it. Your work belongs in content/.

Where to go next

Read the next two posts in order. The first explains the block of YAML at the top of every post and what each field controls. The second explains drafts, which is how you keep something out of the public site while you are still figuring out what it says.

After that, delete these posts. They exist to be read once and thrown away, and the folder is more useful to you empty.