A Little About This Little Site
As I mentioned in my previous post, I vibecoded this little blog of mine rather than using an existing solution like Wordpress.
Part of the reason why I decided to code my own blog was just so I can learn how to build a website, again, in 2026. The last time I built a website for myself was well over 10 years ago. I remember designing it in Photoshop, coding it in TextWrangler, and then uploading my little HTML/CSS files to my Bluehost server through Cyberduck. A lot’s changed since then.
For this site, I wrote out my thoughts regarding what functionality I wanted, mentioned that I wanted the design to be stupid simple, and then Claude mostly took care of the rest. I tell Claude what I want, it gives me the files, I commit the files to GitHub and then those files are presented to you by Vercel. No designing, no coding, no drag-and-dropping. What a different process.*
The other reason why I went with my own solution is that I know just how little functionality I need. I know my posts will mostly just be text so I added functionality to support different text styles. I know that, someday, there might be a bunch of posts so I added the ability to tag posts so there’s some sort of organization (I’m currently not bothering with tags since there’s so few posts). YouTube embeds are supported and so are image uploads. That’s it.
There are no tools to support sharing posts on social media, no SEO tools, no fediverse support, no ad tools, no store support. None of that stuff. This is a web 1.0 blog and that’s by design.
I originally planned on making this blog a sort of template that others could clone and use for their own needs, but I started to notice that things got complicated when I tried making something that’ll work for everyone vs. just myself so I abandoned that idea.
This is my blog. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
*For any developers reading this: I know I can optimize that flow to be even simpler, but I refuse to pay for Claude Code and hey, I don’t mind taking the longer route sometimes.