Exploring new ways to create a website. Went back to coding.
March 18, 2025
Written by: Matthew Oyan
I discovered a new AI code assistant program called Augment Code. This was the code assistant I was looking for, it can know your entire codebase pretty quickly, so there’s far less confusion between the user and the LLM and keeps everything on track. It looks like it has a very high context window too even on the free tier.
The free “Community” tier allows for 3000 messages per month which is more than enough for me given I’m not a full time coder. Augment does state that AI training is permitted on the free tier, but I have no issues with it for this project or other projects I’ll be working on, given they’re personal websites, or other websites I’m made to work on, that would’ve been scraped anyway since they’re straight HTML/CSS/JS code.
With it, I finally managed to properly implement a gallery and lightbox system in this website. Previously it was “handmade” (with AI tools of varying quality and features) without trying to rely on external libraries, but it turns out a library is what I really needed for the features I was looking for.
Enter PhotoSwipe, a JavaScript library for creating a lightbox gallery. It’s very easy to use and has a lot of features. I’ve implemented it in this website, and it works great. With some modifications I managed to get it working the way I like it. I didn’t expect that it’ll play well with Jekyll, but Augment’s help, it did.
I tried “no-code” website builders like Publii or Webstudio, but neither gave me absolute flexibility when it comes to customizing the look of my site, and Webstudio in particular felt quite cumbersome to use, despite looking like Wordpress’s or Squarespace’s no-code editors. Could be a skill issue on my part, but in fairness to me, I’ve only half-heartedly tried to use both programs, knowing their limitations pretty early on.
I am considering going for Netlify over Github Pages, but I’m not sure if it’s worth the hassle. I don’t know yet if deploying Jekyll sites on Netlify is easier, but it looks like they have much better CDNs and speeds compared to Github Pages. Github Pages has a far smoother workflow however. I just need to git push and the site is built for me and updated.