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.