How?

• This site is hosted on Cloudflare Pages because its free tier is free!
• The site is built using the blog generator, Eleventy, because both ChatGPT and Gemini suggested it.
• Consulting, coding and design assistance is (currently) provided by ChatGPT at the $20 a month tier.
• Human readable content with opinion is, ya know, created by me, myself and I edit the files (content + code) on my mac mini. All the files are managed using git source control and they live online in github.com.

Why?

The first thing I started doing was finding interesting links that I can share. I am always finding stuff to share and nothing gives me joy like finding an article just right for someone else’s interests. I was emailing and texting these and decided that a blog was the next logical step. Duh. And that’s what I was putting up into wordpress. Also, the less attention I pay to our current political conundrum the better,(2025-05-04) and here is a positive thing I can do with the vast swathes of time that stretch before me.

The second reason to keep a blog, is to post my reading which I was already doing on goodreads.com. But goodreads forces me to go to their pokey website in order to post and I am fundamentally unimportant and unnoticed on goodreads; my reviews just bolster the data that drives their little tollbooth on the internet superhighway. Folks that receive attention on goodreads are deserving, no doubt, I don’t begrudge them the love, but I get no feedback on the site so why bother? Here, also, I have no readership to speak of but being my own unread institution/site/brand just feels better than helping goodreads. Even with no readers, my notes and reviews make me go through the thought process of writing, an exercise that has value for me.

But regarding my opinion of goodreads, maybe that’s just spite talking. Maybe. Whatever. Fuck those guys.

Origin Story

I have been maintaining a blog on WordPress.com, but I found that as a beginner, it really wants me to “pick a lane” for my content (either book stuff or news stuff — no easy way to have them both without too much effort). Also, to update the pages I have open a browser page and update the text on the WordPress site.
And on top of that, you pay for the service, which is just a low-grade stressor I don’t need living in DJT’s america.

So I have been puttering around with a thing called Web Origami hoping to eventually produce something I could host for cheaper than WordPress.

• Then one day a few months ago, I found Cloudflare Pages , and its free tier lets me host the blog.
• Last week, sick of hacking on web origami, elegantly-designed as it is, I decided to let an AI — specifically Gemini — help me design my blog to reuse the markdown posts that were already in WordPress. “What’s the worst that could happen?”, I thought.
• The AI suggested I use a blog generator called Eleventy. Like a newbie, I asked it to generate the whole blog with book notes and weekly posts… After a few hours, I got stuck where it couldn’t seem to make everything work.
• So I started over with the intention of taking baby steps. To make a clean start, I used ChatGPT , which also suggested Eleventy. I asked it to just create a book blog.
  Once I got that working, I moved on to books in progress, then to RSS feeds, and so on.
  It has taken about a day — working with the AI, and a whole lot of copying/pasting and bug-hunting — to create something that doesn’t embarrass me.

PS, this is not an endorsement of ChatGPT over Gemini because I don’t know enough to say one is better than the other. I only switched AIs because of an emotional impulse, I believe that working in smaller steps is the leading factor in my second try success.