Background

I have owned esterill.com on and off since around 1995. Some years ago I decided to re-register it and make my own website to keep track of and document things I was interested in. I don’t post to social media very much as I prefer having total control over whatever I do put out there. Anyway, I finally decided to get on with it - a primary driver was the imminent requirement to showcase my late Father’s slide collection which I am currently digitising.

I have much experience with computers, internet and software so I am perfectly capable of organising my own website but I decided to involve an AI to help get this set up as I don’t have huge amounts of time. This has been an excellent decision.

Prompt

This was my first prompt to claude.ai

I want to build a personal website (accessible globally). I want to occasionally publish articles with pictures and I have a project upcoming which will have a lot of scanned slides that I want to present in a nice way. I want to do this all for free if possible. I have a .com domain registered with what used to be Google registry and I would like to use that to point to the website. It is important that I have a local copy of the website that can be served from my windows PC for testing etc. I am not too bothered about having back end processing or databases but that would be a bonus if available. What suggestions do you have?

Technology

After a small amount of back and forth, ‘we’ settled on the following

  • Local Site developed using Hugo
  • Hosted using Cloudflare Pages
  • Domain remains registered on Squarespace
  • DNS for domain is managed by Cloudflare
  • DNS allows esterill.com to link to Cloudflare website
  • DNS also allows for email forwarding
  • Wrangler used to deploy site to Cloudflare
  • At the moment papermod is the theme used on most of the website

Using Cloudflare is free for up to 20,000 hosted files with a maximum single size file limit of 25MB. Also available is Cloudflare Workers which allows edge processing in a variety of languages and R2 object storage which allows 10GB of further storage.

Hugo uses markdown which is a very simple way of formatting html and I have become quite adept at it very quickly. In VS Code I use a markdown preview extension to get a realtime view of my page as I type it.

Hugo has a local server which recognises every change to the site and re-builds it. I have a web browser pointing to this server and it automatically updates as I save changes.

This has all been accomplished in my spare time and has taken just a few hours so far. Oh, and it’s all free. Well, except the domain registration fee every year.

Using AI

My experience with this project and AI has been very positive. If I want to do anything new, I have found it much faster to query the AI as part of the ongoing conversation than look up documentation and use google. That isn’t to say that I have not read any documentation, it’s just much faster getting past small roadblocks to use AI.

These first few articles have been a learning experience not just because the technology is new to me but also because I have been trying to document processes for general consumption. If you have been reading them - thank you.