I have recently switched from WordPress to plain HTML. It went amazing for a couple of weeks, but now I've decided to switch to Eleventy (11ty) for a better writing experience.
Reasons for the switch
I mostly work with Claude for this website. While I like that it can give me a full HTML block for my tool pages copies, I had a hard time updating them by hand. For this reason, I first thought about writing the copy with Markdown, and then converting it to HTML, but that didn't make much sense.
I then thought about switching to Eleventy with a CMS on top, but I postponed it many times since the switch sounded very complex. I knew I would be able to use markdown files, and that led to:
Obsidian
I'm familiar with Obsidian since I used it for note taking and stuff before. Recently, I've stopped using it a whole lot, and wanted to go back to writing more with it. When I learned I can use Obsidian as my make-shift CMS, I immediately went for it at 2 AM, while trying not to fall asleep.
Claude failed me
While planning out what to do, I had about 3% of usage on my account. I stupidly thought "OK, I think this will be enough.". If you don't know, Anthropic recently lowered the usage limits on Claude.
It made a good plan for the switch to Eleventy, however, when it finished planning, I saw that my usage jumped to about 50%. Which was concerning, but the switch had to happen now!
I let Claude Code loose, and started watching. I of course ran out of usage limits midway into the switch, but it had made the base.njk file I needed, and actually switched out some of the pages from HTML to .njk successfully.
So, although I was very hesitant, I decided to just give Gemini the code and hope that it understands from context what I was trying to do.
Gemini sucks, but it works
I gave the Gemini the work that Claude had done up until failing. I deliberately used the "Pro" model, hoping it would somehow come close to Claude.
Well, it was very confident and said:
To keep the momentum going, you can just paste the original HTML for whichever tool is next, and I can convert it into the
.njkformat using thebase.njkstructure that was already established!
I trusted Gemini and gave it the HTML file. It actually surprised me. It worked really fast, and gave me the .njk file without any major issues.
It complimented the way that "I wrote the code" throughout, hasn't failed to give references on the pages it was editing at that moment, which I haven't asked for of course, and wasted a good amount of water for stuff I didn't even bother to read.
Gemini is like a hyperactive golden retriever puppy that brings you every toy in the house to prove you it's loyalty. It sometimes brings trash as well, which Gemini hasn't failed to do so in this coding session, but it generally means well.
The results
Well, I'm trying out writing this post with Obsidian right after I saw that it worked locally. I probably won't publish this until tomorrow, so I can check some stuff before going live with it (hopefully I don't hit my usage limit midway through again). But, it's been very smooth up until now. I haven't yet switched out the old pages to markdown files, but everything in due time.
Also, I might switch to something else at any given moment. I saw how good plain HTML was, and couldn't help but upgrade it to something even better. Obsidian is good, but Decap CMS looks good as well.