Vibe Coding a Blog - 4.14.26

I have wanted to start and maintain a blog for a few years, but I have yet to stick with it. First I tried self hosted WordPress. 

                          __________________
                          \                 \
                            \                 \
                              \                 \
                                \                 \
               /-------------------------------------
             //---------------//                  / |
           //               //                  / __|
         //               //                  / /  ||
       //               //                  / /    ||
     //_______________//   o o            / /      ||      ___/-\___
    ------------------------------------/   ------- |     |---------|
    | DO NOT PLAY |         | WORDPRESS |           |      | | | | |
    | ON OR AROUND|         | WEBSITES  |           |      | | | | |
    |--------------         ------------|           |      | | | | |
    |                                   |           |      | | | | |
    -------------------------------------------------      |_______|

So then I tried ghost. This was actually usable and light weight, but still didnt captivate my fleeting child like wonder. Recently though, I came across Berkshire Hathaway's site after a coworker brought it up. I thought there was something really cool about its simplicity. What better way to learn, then by starting from scratch? Mash 6 sentences into Cloud and reverse engineer HTML. See below for my beautiful prompt, spelling and all.

"I need help creating an extremely basic, static website. I want 2 template pages, first is a homepage with a briefe introduction and then links below to blog posts. Second is a blog post template. All font should be monospaced (something like Courier New). No dynamic opbjects. First page, the list of blog posts should be in a 2xX table that will be manually populated as I make more blog posts. Second, blog posts will be in the format TITLE - DATE. Text must be white, and background black."

My experience with generative AI has been "garbage in, garbage out" and my prompt was definitely garbage. Warm, wet, smelly garbage. And thus, my lack of understanding and knowledge once again produced a result that somewhat resembled what I thought I wanted, but was not what I actually wanted.

Here are my initial learnings while vibe coding a blog.

  1. CSS is a thing.
  2. I wanted the page to load on almost any device imaginable.
  3. Many basic features were not supported ~35 years ago. Blah blah doctype, meta tags, attributes, CSS, tables blah blah.
  4. Wait no, I do need CSS for "dark mode". My only exception to my desire for maximum compatibility, but Claud assured me older browsers would default to a readable state :)
  5. Added 1 more only exception and made everything monospaced with CSS.
  6. I will worry about mobile users at a later date (probably). For now they will suffer through a suboptimal experience.
  7. Claud added a stupid emoji to the back button and I had to remove it.

#I enjoyed this. #You should try it too if you enjoyed this. #Maybe this will actually have more that one blog post before it dies. #This is definitely better than WordPress. #This is marginally better than ghost. #I'm glad I was born in current age because otherwise I think my family would have pushed me out to sea on an ice chunk like the Inuit did to their elderly (myth?).

 

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