Previously, my old website was situated at https://fs29.webflow.io.

This is a site I have handcrafted and used for years - inspired by this site https://gregkohn.com/, a person whose interview I once failed for a technical JavaScript interview!

Webflow, for me, is too expensive. My site is barebones, namely some short articles and previously job and work descriptions. For me, enabling this on Webflow would cost me $276 a year, or $29 a month. This is a problem - I am cheap.

For years I simply used a simple redirect, directing all traffic from this site to webflow's custom domain. Instead, I decided to undo this laziness by building a proprietary version in 3 hours.

To accomplish this, I spent the first day at Fractal, a NYC-based accelerator for software engineers looking to upscale their artificial intelligence background, on rapidly iterating on this.

After Andrew detailed a cursory, yet effective, explanation to embrace diving deep into Claude Code, I jumped in. Before, I was copy pasting entire code files into Claude, demanding its agency as I sat by in a lazy stupor.

Admittedly, I did much of the same, but less copy-pasting instead using Claude within the terminal. This is still a learning journey for me, but I was aghast learning just how long I had been doing this the wrong way by using Claude's native app to copy-paste production-critical software. Being in a space of 25+ other developers, this knowledge transfer took mere seconds (another thing I love about being here in the short time so far!)

I decided to try an interesting approach. Where will I create, edit, and store my blog posts?

I ended up coming up with a unique idea. I would:

  • Use Obsidian (which I am currently editing in) to write my posts
  • Use my iCloud drive as the source of my Obsidian vault / where all my articles would be stored
  • Use Claude to create a build script that would take the latest version of all my posts in my Obsidian vault, convert them to static HTML pages, and serve them to the client.

The result?

I have an even more robust, cloud-powered CMS where I'm in control of the data to achieve the exact same functionality as my Webflow site.

I deployed my site to my domain (which is hosted on Cloudflare Pages), thus taking the total cost down to $0 (except for the one-time cost of my domain).

This was all done through Claude in a couple of hours. Truly awesome to automate this all so quickly, and only just scratching the surface.