This website!

Previously if you visited stephenburkot.com you would have been met with my Squarespace site which was focused on my (former) photography business. While the costs weren’t too insane it was hard to rationalize the ~$200/year to host a platform which:
A) Confused couples trying to find a photographer but did not provide a way to contact me

B) Confused people who knew me as an engineer, not a photographer

I had heard of claude before from Vergecast/HardFork/the internet as a whole but hadn’t paid much attention as most vibecoding attempts seemed to frustrate users. However, I was inspired after Casey Newton and Kevin Roose mentioned how easy it was to move away from Squarespace via Claude. At the same time I wanted a medium to post projects and work I was doing which is too sporadic and unfocused for a social media site.

I therefore paid the $20 to Anthropic to get Claude code and within a couple of days of tweaking I was able to get something I think is fairly usable
Some lessons from using claude:

• Don’t let it git push without your explicit instructions. I quickly went over my credits as it was pushing for simple syntax or button issues.
• It is not hard to exhaust your compute per day. I was barely able to stand anything up the first day before I ran out and had to wait 4 hours.
• Prior instructions can be quite sticky. I tried to completely change my theme several hours later and it would make some small changes but was quite resistant to large changes.

I’m hoping I have designed it to facilitate easy posting so I do it more often, time will tell if that’s true.