Claude Updated Bloganueva

I used Claude Code to completely rearchitect Bloganueva. The front-end looks almost exactly the same, but everything underneath is brand spankin' new. I initially built this blog on Laravel 5 and updated the framework a few times over the years, but it's been on Laravel 9 since 2022. It's now on Laravel Framework 13.29.0 with Tailwind CSS v4.3.3!

My first prompt was:

create for me a new laravel website and install a mysql database to use with it

Claude Code installed a lot of software on its own and gave me all the terminal commands to install everything else I needed to run a new Laravel website on my MacBook Air.

From there it just kept asking me questions about things it thought I would want, and it was right every time. Every question it asked was something I would've done. It prompted me to add features I never thought of and had a lot of great suggestions to make my blog better. It asked me if I wanted an admin side of the website because it's a blog. It built this dashboard without me even asking for it, and I find it really useful. It asked me if I wanted to have a Markdown editor for my posts. I've been using Markdown for years now in different apps, most recently in Obsidian, so I loved that it suggested this. I wanted the ability to draft a post for a while, but I never needed it, so I never took the time to do that. Claude did it in minutes.

I integrated Claude with my GitLab. It committed and pushed after every action it took after I prompted it. I was able to easily revert changes, and everything went fine. All I had to do was tell Claude to "undo that."

I actually forked my project at a certain point when I thought the codebase was minimal yet complete enough to be used to create other Laravel blogs. I called it Larawind CMS, and I just found out during writing this post there's already a project with that name 🙃, so no one will ever see it.

Anyway, after it was done creating the foundation; I prompted Claude to look at my local repo for my old codebase to get fonts, colors, and images. I told it to style it exactly how my old one looked. It definitely took a lot of iterations to get this right. During this process, Claude controlled Google Chrome to check what it was doing, which I thought was interesting because it didn't seem to work as well as it thought it did. I did do a few things manually because even though I would tell it to do something exactly, it was slightly off quite often. Maybe I just wasn't explicit enough. Eventually with a lot of fine-tuning, I got the front-end perfect.

After I was satisfied with how my local version worked and looked, it was time to publish it. I host Bloganueva myself on Linode. Claude could not hook into my Linode and do everything for me (or it does, I just have no idea how to do that), so Claude made me a runbook so I could spin up a new server for my new and improved blog. To make the runbook it asked me questions.

Claude: Where should the new blog live? Your portfolio site currently occupies bloganueva.com.

Me: Replace bloganueva.com with the blog

Claude: How do you want to handle the server itself?

Me: New Linode on Ubuntu 24.04 (Recommended)

The runbook was incredibly helpful, but it was out of order. It was numbered, but it wasn't numbered in the order of the steps I should take, so it was kind of annoying jumping back and forth across it. Nonetheless, it was still way better than me Googling for every single command I needed to run.

I enjoyed this process quite a bit. I learned a lot about how to best utilize Claude and how to prompt it. I had been thinking about updating my blog for years, but I didn't want to take the time. The technical debt really built up, so I came to the conclusion I was probably going to start from scratch. According to Claude this whole process took about 35 hours. It would've taken me way longer by myself if I started from scratch, at least weeks, maybe months if I was really dragging it out. It should be much easier for me to upgrade to new versions of Laravel and Tailwind. Overall, I'm happy that I tried this out and ecstatic that it worked so well.