Goodbye Grav, Hello...Something Else

I did it again. The thing about having a web site is that you get bitten by the bug, at some point. The bug of starting again. When this site ran on WordPress, largely as a motorcycle-related site, that decision came easily. Someone broke into WordPress and horked everything up. That was...disappointing.

So, I rebuilt, and switched to the Grav CMS. I liked Grav. But it was getting a bit long in the tooth. After years, they finally came out with a new version, but the upgrade path would've been inconvenient. It couldn't just be an upgrade in place, it had to be a more of a rebuild. It would require a new template and plugins and...well, more than I wanted to do.

And then I thought, if I have to do a partial rebuild, why not do it myself? All of the content was there for Grav, with all the pages in markdown files. I had all my images. And I have a Gemini Pro AI subscription that come's with Google's Antigravity CLI coding tool which I could run inside VSCodium. And my main computer is a Debian box that has PHP installed. I could "code" and test locally, right on my machine. And I've programmed in PHP off and on for years.

But, note the scare quotes around the word "code", above. Honestly I didn't code anything. Antigravity did it all. I vibe-coded this bad boy in about 6 hours.

I just provided Antigravity with my Grav template's customized CSS stylesheet, and all the markdown and image files that contained my existing content. I checked over the PHP, of course, but what I wanted to so was so simple, there was no need to code it by hand. Now, I'm not sure I'd trust Antigravity to code a big, complex project for me. But, since all I needed was an index.php file, a CSS stylesheet, and some JavaScript to animate the header scroll animation, Antigravity did fine. All the rest is handled by a couple of common, well-known PHP libraries that nearly everyone uses. In fact, Grav used the same libraries. The majority of my time was spent testing and tweaking, then telling Antigravity to build it for me.

It would taken three times that amount of time to upgrade to Grav 2.0, get a template for it, then edit all the CSS, Twig, and YAML files. In doing it "myself", I more or less replicated the design of the Grav site. Plus, I ended up with PHP-driven web site that runs in a tiny footprint, and, seems blazingly fast. Maybe I didn't hand-write the code (which, honestly, is a little embarrassing), but I prompted the hell out of this web site.

Even better there's no admin console to deal with, or an online markdown editor, or any of that stuff. I literally write my markdown file in Obsidian, then FTP the new file up to the web server. Everything else happens automatically. I used Grav's folder structure for content, and set the YAML properties I need in Obsidian, and the rest is just magic. I can manage the entire site with Obsidian and FileZilla.

So, welcome to...whatever this is. It's a tiny, bespoke, dynamic web site that I built by prompting an AI to write PHP for me. But this it's mine. And, some time in the future...well...I guess I can just rebuild it again.