How this web page was created - Part 1 of Many

Hi there.

This is probably my 10th is 11th attempt at maintaining an online journal. Hopefully my last and one where the writing is prolific, useful and engaging. I will make it a point to ensure that there is little or no AI generated content (text) in this page. I use enough AI while writing code and feel I need to keep those cognitive pathways warm in some way. Claude has made me generally very rusty My writing speed has reduced significantly over the past year and I feel that while I can talk faster, I am typing much more slowly. I am not sure why..

Coming back to the main topic of this series of posts. I have had the itch to build my own website for journalling and logging for a very long time. I simply hadn’t gotten down to the task of learning enough of webpage hosting to make a serious attempt. But with the advent of seriously good coding AI (I use claude code and it rocks!), I was finally able to take a stab at it. This is the result. I learnt a lot along the way and would like to document it for two reasons:

• Others who want to walk down the same path can avoid many of the pitfalls.

• It gives me the illusion of having done something, built a thing, understanding how it works. Without this, there is nothing here that ties the website build to me but a shaky and embarrassing sequence of prompts.

So, there we are. The preliminaries are done and we can dive into the details.

Requirements

My requirements were odd enough that nothing out-of-the box really fit the bill.