Yes, the very website you are on right now!
It acts as a theme on top of WordPress, which makes it easier to add blog posts, edit etc.
I had to use skills such as docker, command line, ssh keys, messing DNS caching and so much more.
All of the code is available on my Github
Find out more in the blog post!
All code is available on Github
Initially, this was meant to be a quick project of creating a custom WordPress website using ChatGPT to show my projects. As I learned ChatGPT’s limitations and Oracle’s limited support, things did not go to plan.
The Aim 🎯
- To make a Portfolio website to share my projects
- For the projects to be shown in a timeline
- To use WordPress for easy editing
- Host it for free on Oracle cloud free tier
- Use ChatGPT to make it
- Connect it to my domain on Cloudflare
Making the website 👨🏾💻
Before starting, I made a plan. This was a rough idea of what I wanted the website to look like and the features it should have.
As I started the project, I initially got ChatGPT to make a website, which it did in react. It made a clean, elegant webpage with all the features I requested. I had some issues with the 1000 line file limit but it ended up being fine as I pretty much happy with the site.
After that I wanted to get ChatGPT’s website working, where I learned that in order to get a website to work with WordPress, it needs to act as a theme or plugin. ChatGPT decided to do a hybrid of both a theme and plugin – and it failed completely. I also realised at this point that the whole file ChatGPT wrote was also pretty bad as it was a single file for a whole website. At this point my hope for ChatGPT’s ability to create a website fell, and I decided to start learning full stack web development on Udemy instead.
I was going to create a website after I finished the course, but then I found out about Windsurf which is effectively a code editor with pretty much every good AI available inside. Let me tell you, IT WAS AMAZING! It worked so perfectly and made the website you are on right now as a WordPress theme. It walked me through how to deploy it using a plugin called duplicator and got the site up and running.
Deploying 😩
After this I had to get a server to run WordPress, I decided to use Oracle cloud because of its “always free” tier. I soon came to realise that Oracle cloud has a really steep learning curve and the UI was, to put it lightly – painful to use. I tried to follow a tutorial on their website, and issue after issue arose. Eventually I gave up following the guide and just decided to use docker (which I have previous experience in) on the server which I had created there instead and a Cloudflare tunnel and it worked well.
It was running decently fine but it had random shutoffs. Basically the server sucked and a few weeks later my account was terminated.
At this point I had lost all hope, as I should have made proper backups of my writing. I eventually got most of the stuff I needed to get back up and running though, and after a lot of research decided to host on Netcup because of its low price and good reviews from reddit (it costs €2.18) per month for a WordPress site.
What I learned 📝
- I started to learn full stack web development on Udemy and will continue looking at things in that field
- AI is much more powerful than we think it is, and it will change the way we code
- Making a design for anything beforehand with your priorities is extremely useful
- MAKE BACKUPS
- How to use and exit vim, use ssh keys, cloud consoles, DNS caching (which was a huge pain), a ton of docker commands, the list goes on!
But the question is, considering how time consuming and difficult it was to do this, was it worth it rather than just getting some generic website builder?
In my opinion, yes: I got a custom theme, I learned a lot of skills I will use in the future, and best of all – I don’t have to pay £10 a month!
