It's a new site!

#meta

It’s a new site!

It’s been a minute, but we’re back!

For a long time I have been frustrated about the fact that all my online presences have been owned by Big Tech corporations (except for my Wordpress site, but I couldn’t have my own domain on that without paying and while I believe in paying for software, the price simply wasn’t right for me).

Time will tell how consistent I will be about posting, but I feel like this will be a good first step in trying to claw back ownership of my online stuff even if (for now) it is very much built and hosted using big tech tools.

How it was built

I have had many false starts in the last couple of years where I started to download a framework and then lost interest after realizing that I still found frontend development both hard and uninteresting (I deeply respect people who can do it, but it’s not for me).

So in the end I caved and used AI. Because I’m a cheap Dutchman, I went for the free plan of Google’s Antigravity.

I started out with some fairly high level requirments:

I want to start a project for a personal/professional homepage. I want a simple about me page that includes a resume, but I also want to pick up blogging again so it should facilitate blog posts too.

I haven’t thought a lot about how I want to host it, but I’m pretty sure that for now I just want a static site with all the posts written in markdown. I’m not a frontend engineer, but I want a clean and fairly simple theme.

Finally, I used to have some blogs in the past (one is still on hosted wordpress, the other is long dead, but some pages are archived on archive.org. I want to pull out as many of those old posts and resurrect them. This can be much later in the plan, but we should consider strategies to download and bulk transform those into new blog posts.

The initial recommendation that came out of that was Astro. I did challenge that recommendation and asked about Eleventy, but in the end I came down on the side of not wanting to super tweak things for now and my initial priority was to prioritize on getting the all the content converted to markdown and to nail down the URL schemas I want to use. Outside of that the framework is just a tool and should be quite interchangeable.

During development I ran out of Gemini 3 (High) tokens before too long, but much to my shock, the output of Gemini 3 Flash was also pretty acceptable. I have used AI coding tools for a couple of years now, but I was particularly impressed with how Antigravity consistently added scripts to perform actions and was pretty consistent about validating any changes that were made with the initial requirements. It definitely went off the right path a couple times (and initially I hadn’t consistently committed changes), but after the first time there was an expensive mistake the AI was smart enough to restore from git and then rerun a (fixed) fix.

All in all there were a couple of nights work to get the site to where it’s now. Projects that needed to be undertaken:

So here we are. There is a site. It’s easily edited with a simple text editor and updated through a simple Git push.

There are a bunch of nice to haves that I still need to think about how to implement: