I've had a personal Claude Pro subscription for a few months now. I've used it to build a few apps that my kids and I use at home. Most recently, I rebuilt my personal homepage with the help of Claude Code.
Choosing a tech stack
Part of my discussion with Claude was what tech stack to build the new site on. I considered React, ASP.NET, or even a popular static site generator like Eleventy. But at the end of the day, those all felt like overkill for a static site with at most 2-3 pages. I decided to just have Claude build it with plain HTML and CSS. Any future updates I can handle myself by editing those files directly, and with continuous deployment from GitHub to Netlify, shipping a new build is quick and easy.
That continuous deployment pipeline turned out to be one of the real benefits of using Claude to help build websites. It knows GitHub, and it knows Netlify. I had no idea how to set up a pipeline that deploys automatically from GitHub to Netlify, and researching it myself probably would've taken a few hours. With Claude, I had step-by-step instructions and a working pipeline in under 10 minutes.
So, for awhile now, the Write.as Archive Page Generator on my hobby site wasn't working anymore. For some reason, calls to the Write.as api just started failing. The error I was getting back was “The response ended prematurely.”
Took me awhile, but I finally found a fix for the error. Turns out, I now need to add a “user-agent” default header value to my requests, to allow the api call to go through. This seems to be an issue affecting Web APIs written using C#/.NET starting June 2024. Credit goes to this answer from StackOverflow.
It's been awhile since I wrote on this blog. I'm currently working on a possible rebuild of my landing page found at dinobansigan.com. That website is a static website generated using Wyam. I'm thinking of rebuilding it using ASP.NET Razor Pages.
I thought about rebuilding it using ReactJS. But for a mostly read-only website, using React seems overkill. Same goes for using ASP.NET Core MVC; it is overkill for such a simple website. Thought about using Blazor, but I do not need this website to be an SPA. So, ASP.NET Razor Pages seems like the perfect choice for what I want to do.
I only started working on this like 30 minutes ago. Here's what I have so far.
After I'm satisfied with the content on the pages, I'll move on to modifying the look/theme of the website. Then will need to figure out where to host it.
Part of the reason I stuck with a static website build, is because I can host it for free on Netlify. However, I've been wanting to see what it takes to host an ASP.NET website outside of Azure. Now is my chance to learn how to make that work.
This seems like a great primer for learning how to use CSS to improve readability of posts on your site. It covers a bunch of CSS topics like font size units, letter and word spacing, width and alignment of text, etc...
