Maybe the secret to posting more often is to have interesting and/or useful things to say. I’m not sure what that says about my extremely intermittent posting frequency over the last five years or so.
Building websites (easily)
But it looks like I’m on a roll. I have a few things I want to share with you. I’ve been down a bit of a rabbit hole thinking about the various different ways that websites are built these days.
Over the last few months, I’ve become lightly involved with the Clapham Society - that’s a local group that spreads news about life in Clapham and gets involved in campaigning against things that are likely to have a negative effect on that life.
They wanted a new website. Now, I know a bit about how websites work, but I’d never describe myself as a web designer and I just don’t have the capacity to get involved in a project that needs to move a lot of content from an old website to a new one. But I had some conversations with them about what they were looking for in a new website and I helped them choose an agency that would build the new site (they went with Agency for Good, who seem to be very… well… good!) I also helped out wrangling their old domain name from their previous web hosting company and helped them get set up on Google Workspace (using a free account from Google for Nonprofits).
Anyway… that all went very well. But I started thinking about all of the horror stories you hear about small businesses that get caught up with cowboy website development companies and then end up with a website that doesn’t work for them, costs too much money and is hard to maintain.
And that led to me writing my Website Guide (aka “What to Ask Your Website Company”). The aim was to write in non-technical language and provide a short and easy-to-understand guide that would give small business owners[*] the information they need to make better decisions when choosing a company to design and build their website.
Yes, it’s a bit outside my usual areas of expertise, but I think it works. I’m considering turning it into a short e-book next.
I realised this had all got a bit meta. I had built a website about how to get people to build you a good website. So I decided to lean into that and wrote a blog post called “How I Build Websites in 2025” which explained the process and tools I had used to build the websites about building websites. Are you still with me?
Then, yesterday, I decided to take things a bit further. Like most geeks, I have several domains just lying around not doing anything useful and I wanted to know if I could quickly spin up a website on one of them that could bring me a bit of income (or, perhaps, get enough traffic that I could sell it on in a few months).
So in six hours or so, I built Balham.org. Well, I say “I”, but I couldn’t have done it without a lot of help from ChatGPT. That help basically came in three areas:
High-level input. Answering questions like “What sort of website should we build?”, “What pages should we have?” and “How do we make money out of this?”
Data and content. How long would it take you to get a list of 20 popular Balham businesses and create a YAML file suitable for use with Jekyll? ChatGPT did it in a minute or so.
Jekyll advice. I’m starting to understand Jeykyll pretty well, but this project went way beyond my knowledge many times. ChatGPT really helped by telling me how to achieve some of my goals.
We did what we set out to do. The site is there and is, I think, useful. Now we have the phase where so many projects stall (I nearly wrote “my projects” there, but I think this is a problem for many people). We need to promote the site and start making money from it. That’s probably another session with ChatGPT next weekend.
And finally on this subject, for now, at least, today I wrote a blog post about yesterday’s project - “Building a website in a day — with help from ChatGPT“.
[*] Owners of small businesses, not … well, you know what I mean!
Data Munging
I’m still working on the second edition of Data Munging with Perl. But, more urgently, I’m currently working on the slides for the talk I’m giving about the book next Thursday, 27 March to the Toronto Perl Mongers. I’m not flying to Toronto, it’s a virtual talk that I’ll be giving over Zoom. There are already over a hundred people signed up - which is all very exciting. Why not join us? You can sign up at the link below.
The book will be out as soon as possible after the talk (but, to be clear, that’s probably weeks, not days). Subscribers to this newsletter will be the first people to know when it’s published.
Anyway, that’s all I have time for today. I really need to get back to writing these slides. Thanks for taking an interest.
Cheers,
Dave…