To the 1-2 people that read my blog : I'm sorry for going radio silent... again.. but ya know what? The possibility of timely future updates are trending in a positive direction! And the reason is .. complicated ..

This is my first post using a GUI I "created" for this blog. I quoted "created" because it's 95% "vibe coded". I could have likely written it myself.. but why would I do that at this point? If you have read my previous blog posts, you likely know why. If not - well.. nuance matters.

I started this "blogging" project as a proof-of-concept, bare bones approach to bloated, overly complicated self-managed blogging options. And, as simple as it is, I'm actually quite happy with the "public-facing" portion of the blog and, moreover, the extremely light nature of the code base (which is a bit of a hybrid using flat files, built-in directory indexing, and Python). That said, it required me to write using a wonky form of "pseudo-code" which, of course, makes getting a blog post actually UP kinda clunky and time consuming and, as such, takes away from my overall "blogging experience". Conclusion - I needed to remove that friction.

My first instinct was to create a "converter" that could generate that pseudocode for me automatically. Simple enough, but Google Docs was still sub-optimal for adding links, images, etc the way I needed them added. That's when I decided I needed a bespoke GUI for this (continuously expanding) project. But BOY do I hate UI coding, especially when I'm currently the only person that will ever leverage it! And my little "go around" with vibe-coding one-page games proved promising, so I decided - why not try writing a GUI for my blog in a similar fashion?

Most of it worked out the chute, but trying to accommodate "highlighting" of URLs, Emails, and Webfingers took some real effort. For those interested in the details- it hides what is in HTML the textbox and adds a "secondary layer" with that highlighting.. easy enough - but getting those layers to sync up was a real struggle (if you highlighted characters using a mouse, the visuals were a mess). Trying to simply "explain it to Claude using simple English" didn't resolve crap, and Claude was more than happy to lie about his accomplishments. Thankfully, I know Javascript and how to overcome some nuanced web development hurdles pretty well, and was able to make code-specific suggestions along the way to our automated gas-lighter.

Results - it now works! And, similar to the "mini-webgame" coding before, it didn't burn me out by requiring me to write hundreds of lines of hyper-petty code that required zero creativity.

I -ish liken it to an automatic dishwasher; it's imperfect, and I'd never use it to prepare a meal (even though it's POSSIBLE... ), but it can totally remove some of the "preparation" steps and allow me to get to making the meal faster.

(Note to self - add the ability to compress uploaded images in the future... )

Conclusion - if you already KNOW exactly what you need to accomplish, pretty much programmatically how to actually do it, it's isolated from "touching" your storage layers, and you have no need to scale the particular code, AI can absolutely help get you there faster and move you onto the "important and fun" stuff. I'm far (far FAR) from using it for everything, but I am happy to find at least a few things to help me move my vanity projects forward.

 

Full disclosure I'm not overly proud of : I (currently) still have a site humming right along using Classic ASP. Prioritizing my site's conversion to Python is kinda how my whole journey into writing the Jenkwerx framework started but, as a busy boi, my progress has been slow. The goal is to be completely Microsoft OS web free in 2026; fingers crossed there! But I'm not the only website that has to eventually quit kicking this pesky can down the road.

 

Posted about my fun little project here on Mastodon and learned about the "Mastodon Server Hug" the hard way..