A New Home

The limitations on Wordpress were dissuading me from working on seale.io for the past year. So I decided to build a new one myself.

First up: the new UI/UX via Google Stitch

The previous seale.io site used one of Wordpress' existing templates and it was an absolute mission to try and make it work with what I wanted to achieve on the site.

I also didn't want to have to pay for an upgraded tier to gain access to more (potentially equally lacklustre) templates.

Enter Google Stitch. After writing out a spec for my site (you didn't think a PO would attempt this spec-less, did you?), Google Stitch came up with a doozy of a design.

After MUCH back and forth, this is what we settled on:

Thereafter, we were ready to hit the technical side of things.

Next up: moving the hosting and deployments to Google Firebase

The domain was bought using Wordpress, so I needed to see if I could use something else to manage the hosting and deployments.

Enter Google Firebase. After messing with some settings on both Wordpress and Firebase, all of the management was transferred to Firebase.

Since I'm quite determined once I've set my mind to something, I did not back up any of the Wordpress settings. Once I'd moved to Firebase, that was it. I couldn't backtrack.

What did not help was the fact that I had deployed a nonsense test site to test Firebase and that was now being served on seale.io. I updated seale.io to redirect to google.com until I was ready to publish my real changes.

The penultimate step: writing the code with Google Antigravity

Can I write code? Yes. Was I going to do so for this entire website? Absolutely not.

Enter Google Antigravity. Once the heavy lifting was done in terms of UI and hosting, I could connect both Stitch and Firebase to the Antigravity IDE and type "build seale.io" into the chat window.

And boom! I had a website riddled with bugs and some gnarly hallucinations, but it was still leagues better than Wordpress' templates with their associated limitations.

Finally: polishing and publishing

I spent a good few days (and credits) cleaning up the AI "dirt" from the site. I tweaked the colours, layout, and functionality until I settled on a version of the site I was happy with.

And that's what you're seeing today. Is it perfect? No. I doubt it will ever be perfect, but that's the beauty of it. I can tweak whatever I want whenever I want. This site can grow with me without limitations.

I'm looking forward to writing on a nicer admin interface (that I built!) and seeing my work on a nicer site (that I built!) and sharing my very many opinions with the world.