About this site

I needed a place of my own to write down what I'm learning, and not just any place would do: it had to be simple and it had to be free.

The simple part speaks for itself. The free part has a catch, and I'd rather say it out loud: I don't know if this is going to last. I might still be writing here in two years, or I might quit in March. I don't know, and that doesn't strike me as a good reason not to start — but it is a good reason not to sign up for anything. A site that doesn't cost me a penny is a site I can park without feeling guilty about it, and that freedom is exactly what I needed to get going.

So the first decision wasn't a technical one, it was laziness: how much work I was willing to put into this site that wasn't writing in it. And the answer was: the bare minimum. Everything else follows from that.

Why static

With that settled, the technology almost picked itself.

A static site is plain HTML: files written in advance that the server hands over as they are. No database, no code running on every visit, nothing to patch for security and nothing to fall over at three in the morning. For what I wanted — write text and publish it — everything else was surplus.

And it fits both conditions from before: it's as simple as it gets, and it's the cheapest thing to host, because serving flat files costs nobody anything.

Why 11ty

I went with 11ty (Eleventy), a static site generator: it takes text in Markdown plus a few templates and spits out the finished HTML.

Three reasons, in order of weight:

• I'd already played with it. I wasn't starting from zero, and when you're learning that's worth more than any feature comparison.
• It has masses of documentation. When you get stuck — and you get stuck — the difference between carrying on and giving up is usually whether you find the answer.
• It's very extensible. It didn't close any doors on me. Whatever I don't need today can be added the day I do.

I looked at others. Jekyll comes as standard with GitHub Pages, so it was the easy path, but 11ty struck me as simpler, more modern and — why deny it — sexier. Astro brings components, islands and half a framework with it, and it can do more, that's true, but I don't need any of that for this project.

And now, where do I host it?

For the free part, GitHub Pages: it lets you host a static site at no cost, and the code was going to live in a repository anyway.

I had looked at cheap hosting and the problem wasn't the money: it was that all of it led me to the same place, to setting up a heavy CMS like WordPress or similar just to end up publishing text. And that wasn't the point.

What won me over was everything around it. Actions rebuilds and publishes the site on its own every time I push something. And branches let me write an article off to one side, mull it over and only bring it out when it's ready, without any of that showing up on the site in the meantime. All of it lives in the same place, and that's exactly what no cheap hosting gave me: simple on the outside, serious tools on the inside.

That way I decide the workflow according to what I need, instead of adapting to whatever the tool brings with it. And publishing comes down to a git push: no dashboard, no FTP, nothing to touch. Exactly the amount of work I was willing to put in.

And what's Claude doing in all this?

I built this site with Claude Code alongside me.

What it saves me is time, and above all the time spent trying things out. I can put forward two ways of doing something and see both of them working within the hour, instead of choosing blind and finding the problem three weeks later. And when I get stuck on something I don't know — which is fairly often — it gets me out of there instead of leaving me going round in circles all afternoon.

In the end I'm the one deciding. The layout of the page, making it look right on any screen, having the site in two languages, the music section: for every one of those there were several ways to go, and the one that's there is the one I chose.

Not a single piece of this site went in without me understanding what it does and why it's there, which was another of the goals.

And now what?

That was the why. The how I'll be telling in separate, more specific articles: the situations I've run into and how I've gone about solving them.

I'll also write about different matters, like other projects not necessarily about IT — for instance my record collection, which is already knocking about here.