I'm Not A Web Dev...So Claude Designed A Website For Me!

So, I continue to be impressed with some of these AI tools, especially the large language models like Claude. I spent a lot of time in the last few months with Claude, especially building certain applications and websites, having it write a lot of custom Python scripts that generate a lot of data for me. And the last several weeks I've been working on this particular website, the DT Options website. You guys know I have a financial channel dedicated to trading options. It's called DT Options. I built this website around it for members of my Discord. It's a private website that they have access to a bunch of different information. I've got a lot going on in here, custom indicators that I helped build with Claude as far as scripts that generate, you know, some interesting information here. So, one of the things with using Claude to build this site, though, this is a Python Flask site. And it's perfect for generating graphs and charts and things like that, generating tables of data. But, here lately I wanted to also create a site that was more of a blog style site, something I can just post blogs, you know, articles to. And I wanted to write it using Emacs org mode because Emacs is what I write everything in. I live in Emacs and I write all of my documents typically in org format. So, naturally I thought about Hugo because Hugo does support writing both markdown and org. So, you write everything in either markdown or org and then you just put those files in a folder on your Hugo server and it creates a website for you. And I was looking at some Hugo themes. I was like, "I'll create a simple little Hugo site, you know." And looking at some of the available themes here. And I realized something. I realized I didn't like any of their themes. So, what I ended up doing is I was like, "You know what? I bet Claude can create a simple base Hugo theme that, you know, over a few days or a few weeks we can build our own custom theme instead of trying to take a pre-designed website and try to basically force it into what I want it to be. Let's just start from scratch with Claude. So, I told Claude, "Question, I use Emacs org for all of my writing. Thus, I would like to be able to use org documents for creating a website. I know Hugo supports org, but the problem with Hugo is all of the publicly available themes kind of suck. Would you be able to create a Hugo theme from scratch?" And Claude answered, "Yes, definitely." And it goes on to explain what Hugo is, how the layout is, how the org support works. You know, which most of this stuff, I mean, I already know how Hugo works. I've built Hugo sites before, but, you know, if you didn't know, it's nice that he posts this information. And then, he wanted to know more about what I wanted. I said, you know, I want a a mix of blog and static pages, and I wanted a dark theme out of the box. I didn't give him any real specifics. I just let him go do his thing. He said, "Okay, we're going to use this color scheme, yada yada yada." And, you know, if you're paying attention to as he's building the site. Finally, I get a zip file with comes complete with all the Hugo stuff. You just unzip it, and you've got your Hugo site with the theme. And this was what it looked like, you know, pretty early on. Now, we did adjust it a little bit. We played with some spacing and stuff, but it was a pretty simple theme. He even created a default post, "Hello org." Right in, [laughter] you know, and I like the color scheme. I like, you know, I may play around with the color scheme at some point, but this was really cool that he created this example Hugo site, Hugo theme uh with the post, and then one about page as far as like a static about page or contact page. You could use this for practically anything. And the very first iteration of this site, you know, with just the one example post and the basic layout and theme took Claude all of, I don't know, maybe 5 minutes, right, to generate the very first site. And then, we started playing around with it, right? Me and Claude went back and forth a few times over a couple of days. You know, I was like, "Hey, this layout looks pretty good, but I'd rather have the spacing be this. I'd want the number of columns to be that." You know, I just tell it exactly what I wanted. And in the end, what me and Claude ended up with Well, I won't say in the end because we're still working on it. Still, basically, this is just an example site. This is what it looks like right now. And I've got these example posts. These are not real posts. They're going to be part of the website, but I had I've got hundreds of org documents. I have uh several uh folders that have org documents related to trading. So, I just threw a bunch of those in the content folder so I could have some stuff. And yeah, this is pretty neat. So, I also put some test images in there so we could have uh images with our posts. Uh I also asked Claude, "Hey, I need table of contents as far as like headers so, you know, I can click on a header and go to that header inside the org document itself." He also added the tags uh to navigate between tags for posts because in Hugo, you can give post tags. That way you can search via tags on your posts. And this is stuff, you know, I'm not a web developer, but it would take me weeks, if not months, to actually do some of this stuff, right? It would take me a long time to create the theme, create the layout. And you know, I specified, you know, I give gave Claude some pretty specifics, you know. I didn't want to throw a bunch of it initially. I let him create the theme, and then we tweaked it, you know, tweak it small uh one at a time. I was like, "Hey, I want a card-style layout where, you know, it fits about four posts um you know, wide on a 1080 kind of resolution." He created that for me. Initially, he didn't have images as part of the post. I said, "Hey, every post I'm going to have an image." So, we added image support. And then I wanted the image also to be part of the post. But, I didn't want the full 1920 by 1080 image, right? It'd be too big. I was like, "Yeah, chop off the top and bottom, you know, and just crop the image a little bit so we get part of a image as a header for each post here." And, you know, again, I'm going to keep working with Claude. At some point, I'm probably going to work with Claude adding some kind of search functionality to this. I may also add a categories, you know, which are very similar to tags also in Hugo. We may have other stuff in the side columns here as in the the actual articles themselves. I may work on a a contact page. We got to do about page, which is just a placeholder right now. All of this is placeholders, but if I needed a contact page that include in that included some way to actually email me, some of that stuff would take some work, but it's going to take Claude mere minutes. So, I see a lot of people that really fear AI, throw a lot of shade on these large language models like Claude and ChatGPT. But, man, these tools are so unbelievably impressive, and they save so much time. Like, if you have a Claude subscription, and you're trying to build a Hugo website or any website, whether it be static websites like a Hugo or something more dynamic, maybe you need a a WordPress theme, whatever whatever it is. Maybe you need to add some functionality to a WordPress site, and there's just something that hey, there's no plugins out there available for you, or maybe there's some plugins out there, but you know, you don't want to have to go pay for some proprietary plugin. It's like, "Hey, Claude, here's what I need. I need this plugin in WordPress that does this. Can you help me create it?" I bet Claude can do it. Matter of fact, I I know Claude can do it without even asking cuz I've created so much stuff over the last several months with Claude. Some really complicated tasks. And with Claude, especially, I can say Claude's really good with Python cuz that's what I mostly do with Claude is write a lot of Python code, especially for a lot of like the financial and trading scripts that that I have him write. Most of that kind of space is dominated by Python code, so that's what I stick with for most of those kinds of financial scripts. But, Claude's really good at Rust because Rust is the hot new language these days. A lot of times, if you're unsure about a language, you don't know any language, and you're creating whatever application, a lot of times Claude and ChatGPT, a lot of these large language models will say, "Hey, why don't we do it in Rust?" And if you're good with that, then he can create some pretty cool Rust applications as well. I've actually created a Python applications, Rust applications. And of course, Claude's really good with Emacs Lisp. I mean, anything I can imagine that I want to do inside Emacs, and I need some kind of extension written for Emacs, Claude really good with Emacs Lisp. And at some point, what I'm going to end up doing, I think, is I'm going to take this simple website that I'm having Claude build, this simple Hugo site where I can just throw some basic plain text, you know, org documents into a folder and have my blog-style articles, you know, all of that, my blog website, right? But, I also will have my website that has all the charts and stuff that are generated from those various Python scripts, the Flask-based website. At some point, we're going to integrate the two sites together. I'm going to need some help with Claude, and I bet Claude is going to pull that off fantastically. In fact, one of the things I might do, you know, some of these charts that are generated, the Python-related charts here, you know, some of the graphs and stuff, I would like to incorporate that into certain blog posts. And I'm just going to get Claude here. What we're going to do is I'm just going to tell Claude, "Hey, I need the ability, when I write some of these articles, sometimes I want to, you know, reference some of these dynamically generated graphs because these graphs and charts are on a cron job. They get generated daily because, you know, each day passes by, new candlestick in the chart, you know, the chart will change over time. But not necessarily the text of the article will change over time. You know, so I've got some ideas that, again, would be complicated would be a complicated site for somebody to build on their own, especially somebody like me that is not necessarily into web dev. I mean, I know a little bit about it and I certainly could do it if I wanted to do a deep dive, but it'd take me a long time and time is money where I could pay I mean, I've got my Claude subscription. I pay Claude whatever $20 a month. You know, I might as well get my money's worth. So, that's it for today's video. Before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this video, Matt, Steve, George, Darloff, Lee, Mark, Mythos, Aryan, Pete Archer, Fedora, Reality Tsurlas, Roland Warjito, Nabuntu, and Willie. These guys they're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this quick look at how Claude can build a Hugo site, it wouldn't have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon cuz I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work and want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace, guys.