Today I made this website in less than 30 minutes with Claude Code. This was my process:

  1. I bought a domain name from namecheap for $12/year.
  2. I started Claude Code in plan mode, explained what I wanted to do, and asked Claude to interview me about my preferences.
  3. After some back-and-forth, we settled on Hugo for building the website and Cloudflare for hosting it. Both are free for small-fry personal users.
  4. Claude wrote all the code in one shot, gave me step-by-step instructions for a few things it couldn’t do, initialized a new GitHub repo, and published the site.
  5. I’ve made a few changes to the website since then, like improving the look of sidenotes and adding mobile support.

The whole thing costs $12/year1 for a minimalist setup that I’m very happy with, and I can just ask Claude Code to add features when I want them.

Things I’m excited about with the new design:

  • Sidenotes!2
  • Simple publishing. Claude helped me set up a system where I write normal Markdown notes in Obsidian, then click a checkbox to confirm a draft is ready to publish. A script runs every morning to publish new posts and incorporate edits to existing posts. That means it’s very easy for me jot out quick notes on my phone or desktop and publish them right away, without dealing with an annoying user interface and clicking a bunch of buttons. I basically never need to visit the website unless I’m working on design changes.
  • Copy as Markdown. Scroll to the bottom of any post and you’ll see a “copy as markdown” button. That makes it easier for people to paste posts into AI chats, especially if they’re reading on mobile.

I’ll likely add email subscriptions after I write several more posts, but there’s already an RSS feed.3 I’ll also add commenting at some point.

There are several features that I see on many blogs and that I’ll consider adding to mine, but I’m not sure whether their value would exceed the cost of clutter—I like a rather minimalist style. These are things like:

  • Search.
  • Tagging.
  • Post descriptions (like, subheaders or small snippets).

I’ve thought about making a personal website for some time, but Claude Code made it super easy. I have an old Substack, but for some reason Substack feels too heavy for the kinds of rough, not-very-considered posts that I’m currently most interested in writing. I’ll probably still keep Substack for longer, more considered essays.

If you’re interested in working on a similar project, feel free to steal my code, but I’d really recommend just starting a conversation with Claude Code and describing what you want.

  1. Plus, I suppose, a miniscule portion of the $20/month Claude Code subscription I use. ↩︎

  2. I became excited about sidenotes recently when I saw them used on Coefficient Giving’s new website (Ctrl+F “years to come” to find the first one)—they seem much more convenient than footnotes because readers can simultaneously see body and sidenote text. If you’re reading this on a computer, the sidenotes should automatically convert to footnotes when you reduce the window width. If you’re on mobile, I have no idea what will happen - I’ll find out when I publish this! ↩︎

  3. Claude made this without me asking - thanks Claude! ↩︎