Using ClaudeCode to create this blog and add features

How I got to host this blog in an afternoon... but why it still is no masterpiece of design.

So, there is a very obvious use for AI that I have not talked about yet. It is this blog itself.

For the last three years, there was a task on my yearly To-Do-list that I have never gotten done. Rewriting, redesigning my personal website maier-borst.de, or starting a new blog project. And it is a shame because how can you take someone seriously whose website is not up-to-date?

Well, the antique web presence of mine is still alive. But this blog is new, and it is largely possible thanks to Claude Code. Within an afternoon, I got it up and running. And that is the great thing about Claude Code.

I had in my mind that I wanted it to be a Svelte-based blog because it is the framework used largely in data visualization these days. And having my website set up in it, is another incentive to stay in touch with the functionalities and changes of Svelte (albeit on a very broad level).

I also knew how I wanted the blog to be structured in three parts, touching on my work in data journalism, regular office hacks, and stuff that I do in my free time. And I also knew what I did not want: Wordpress, complicated backend structure, etc. And with this briefing, I let Claude Code run and got this webpage done for 3 dollars odd.

Also, since I started this, I got some feedback like "Please implement an RSS feed". And I just did this within half an hour. All I needed is to start with this prompt on my terminal:

i would like to include an rss feed into this blog. can you lay out how you would do this?

However, what I have also learned time and again while working on this blog is:
You really have to know what you want to actually get there.

This sounds borderline dumb to Linked-In-Influencer-TedTalk-professionalist. But it is true.

One of the reasons why I got Claude Code to set up my webpage quickly is that I knew at least a little bit about tech stacks and also what I did not need. Once you have this figured out, Claude Code massively speeds up things. I read a bit about RSS feeds which I have not used so far (shame on me) and then I figured out which setup might make sense. And I could ask Claude Code for more specifics.

However, there is also a good example of where I am failing, and it is the design of this very blog. I have changed it now, but it still gives you the vibes of a 2010-ish Tumblr blog. Because a) I don't know what would be really cool, and b) I cannot articulate quite elaborately what I want.

And then you also have moments like this:

A human webpage designer sees right away that the alignment was off and ugly. But Claude Code kept this oddity in place prompt after prompt. To fix it, I actually went into the WebDev inspector mode, and found out that the problem is the border of the .page class. And then told Claude Code specifically to remove it.

Which brings me to the end of this post and two things.

1) Yes, I have slightly changed the design, but it is far from as neat and cool as the one from Lisa Charlotte Muth and that is explainable. I am not an expert, and even if I speed up things, they will still look not-so-pretty largely because I do not know the whole spectrum of possibilities.

2) Just as much, I and we should take time to try out new "AI things", we should still keep the time to try and learn about the things that we want to create with AI. So, what is the trade-off between a manually implemented RSS feed or using an npm package like "feed" to get an RSS feed going? What would actually be a sensible way of making the design neater?

Using ClaudeCode to create this blog and add features

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