Owen McCrink

I was paying Webflow $276 USD a year for my personal site. Plus using Disqus for comments. Madness!

So I decided to rebuild everything using Claude to help with the heavy lifting. Here's how it went:

The Brief

First up, I gave Claude this brief for the design:

My name is Owen McCrink
I was born in 1988
I like old school computing. I build websites on Geocities in the early 2000s
I want a personal hompeage, with my naem, a paragraph about, current projects and a link to blog

The first design was a bit wanky (to Claude: "maybe we re-write it to be a bit less wanky"), but after asking for a rewrite it came good.

The Tech Stuff

• Backend is PHP using text files instead of a database (for blog, comments, work section)
• Comments have approval and email notifications built in
• Blog supports basic markdown
• Used httrack to grab the old Webflow HTML
• Claude helped write Python to parse it all into the new format
• Got Claude to migrate the Disqus comments across
• Used Claude for the favicon (SVG) and open graph images too

Hosting

Moved to Binary Lane VPS at $3.75 AUD monthly. Claude suggested Hestia for the control panel instead of ServerPilot (which would've cost more than the server at $5.50 USD/month!). Setup was super easy (didn't need AI help).

The Good Thing

Monthly costs went from $37 AUD to $3.75 AUD. Plus can use the server for other stuff.

Could Anyone Do This?

I reckon someone with limited tech knowledge could pull this off. The only annoying bit was having to restart chats when they got too resource heavy. But overall, very doable with AI helping out.

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Built and re-written with Claude 3.5 Sonnet