How this website was built

I have tried many content management systems for this website over the years: Carrd, Squarespace, Webflow, WordPress, Quartz, Obsidian Publish, Django, and even hand-written HTML and CSS files. Every solution has either been too technically complex for a mere writer, or too prescriptive and lacking in customisation.

The latest iteration of this website is built using Jekyll and compiled directly from an Obsidian vault. The design is forked from Maxime Vaillancourtis’ digital garden template and modified using Cline running GPT-5.2 in VS Code.

This is a very fun setup, and only possible thanks to generative AI. Installation and troubleshooting were greatly aided by both ChatGPT and Claude. I can publish my thoughts and photography directly from Obsidian (my note-taking app, and where most of my daily work happens). I can ask for design updates in plain English and watch Cline update the stylesheets and HTML, asking for clarifications about the changes as I go.

I am a fan of simple, plaintext and markdown websites (see my list of List of personal websites), and this website is hugely inspired by Kepano. If you’d like to build something similar, I recommend this tutorial, this article, and as many frontier LLM models as you can set your hands upon.

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