Scaling the Absurdity: Giving the Starfish a Proper Home
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The Growth Problem
In my last post, I introduced the "Silly Starfish" - a monument to human inefficiency and the baseline for all the AI R&D hobby projects to come. At that point, the entire site was a single, lonely index.html file. It was a simple, hand-coded structure for a hand-drawn mascot.
But there was a problem. If I was going to document deep dives into random research experiments and creative AI content generation, a single HTML file was going to become a maintenance nightmare very quickly. I needed a way to scale the content without losing the "hand-crafted" (read: slightly broken) soul of the site.
The question: How do I build a scalable research blog that stays out of my way, keeps things fast, and doesn't require me to manually copy-paste headers every time I have a new idea?
The Architect’s Dilemma: Choosing a Generator
I didn't want a heavy CMS. I didn't want a database. I certainly didn't want to spend more time configuring a framework than I did fighting with curves and shading on the starfish logo. I wanted something that felt like the original static HTML but with superpowers.
Enter Eleventy (11ty).
Eleventy is a static site generator that is famously "un-opinionated." It doesn't force you into a specific templating language, it doesn't ship a mountain of client-side JavaScript, and it doesn't care how you structure your CSS. It’s the "vanilla" option for people who like control.
It felt like the right choice for this project: a simple, robust engine to power the increasingly complex AI narratives I planned to host here.
Step 1: Breaking the Monolith
The first task was taking my beautiful (and by beautiful, I mean minimal) index.html and shattering it into reusable pieces.
In the old world, the starfish lived in a static <div> in a static file. In the new Eleventy world, I created a Base Layout. This became the "chassis" of the site - the HTML shell, the TailwindCSS configuration, and the footer.
By moving the core structure into a layout, I could finally stop worrying about the "boring" parts of web development. The starfish now has a permanent, templated home, and I can swap out the content beneath him with a single line of metadata.
Step 2: From Manual Coding to Markdown
The real win here was the blog pipeline. Before, adding a post meant writing more HTML. Now, I can write in Markdown.
Markdown is the bridge between human thought and digital output. It’s clean, it’s fast, and it lets me focus on the story rather than the tags. I set up a blog/ directory where every new .md file automatically becomes a page on the site, sorted by date and tagged for easy navigation.
This is the "researcher's workflow." I want to be able to finish an experiment and have the report live in minutes, not hours of layout tweaking.
Step 3: Integrating the Utility Belt (TailwindCSS)
I kept the TailwindCSS integration but moved away from the CDN approach toward something more permanent. I wanted to make sure the highly fashionable "Nuclear Cheddar" orange colour scheme of the starfish was consistently applied across the entire typography of the blog.
By using the Tailwind Typography plugin, I could ensure that every AI research report looks clean and readable by default, while still maintaining that specific color palette that makes the site feel... well, silly.
The Result: A Scalable Lab
The migration took about a day of "nudging" files around - far less time than it took to draw the starfish's eyes, I might add. But the result is a platform that is ready for anything.
Here is what the "Silly Starfish Lab" looks like now:
- Fast: It’s still just static HTML at the end of the day. No heavy frameworks to load.
- Flexible: I can add and update blog posts in seconds just by creating a new template.
- Scalable: It doesn't matter whether I have one or a hundred posts - the build process will still take seconds.
What I Learned About the Handoff
There’s a strange satisfaction in moving from the "manual labor" of the first post to the "automated efficiency" of this one. It feels like the right progression for this blog:
- The Human Baseline: Hand-draw a mascot (The Starfish).
- The Infrastructure: Build a machine to host the human's thoughts (Eleventy).
- The AI Future: Use the machine to document the AI's outputs (Everything else).
The lab is now open. The starfish has his home. Now, it’s time to see what we can actually build.
Next stop: teaching an AI to write country music. Stay tuned.