Gijs Verheijke

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About this website

20 Jun 2023

First side-quest of 2023: I launched a personal website. I decided to do it the 'hard' way and write it in plain html starting with blank text files, using chatGPT as my teacher. Why? For fun and learning.

You can check out my site to see things like: - My writing on entrepreneurship and life (not that much of it yet) - Which tools and software I use - What I'm working on right now - Random parts of my 'life story'

I've set this up to be the central point online with consolidated information about me that exists completely independent from social media and SaaS platforms. To create this, I simply bought some storage from vultr.com for $1 per month, and a remote server for $5 per month. I'm uploading the html files directly from my laptop, where I create the pages in a text editor (VS Code).

Having my own cloud server with encrypted storage also gives me a place to store certain files independently from Google or Apple. I'm not that paranoid but this does give me a doomsday prepper's kind of satisfaction for some reason.

For writing the HTML, I used chatGPT with prompts like: "I'm building a website in plain html, how do I start?" and other simple things like: "how do I make a bullet point list in html?"

I also used it to convert some of my earlier writing, like some LinkedIn posts, to html, but I found it was actually much easier and faster to do that with a 'traditional' text to HTML converter and then manually reformat headers and lists if needed.

To setup the storage and server I used this excellent guide from Derek Sivers.

Lots of ideas for what else to add to it, and hoping this public place will motivate me to start writing in public more again.

Oh and also that means I finally have a place to publish a list of favorite quotes that I gathered over the years. You can find it here