Tools: So, you want to vibecode a linkblog?

I'm starting here a series of posts about diverse projects I'm developing using some vibecoding (and, sometimes, some manual intervention to organize the resulting code). I'm not going to provide prompts (there are lots of 'experts' out there that can prepare suggestions for you, hehe). For the first project, a bit of context: I've been sharing links in my social accounts (let's use the Mastodon one for reference, https://mastodon.social/@fernand0, but there are instances at Bluesky, Tumblr, LinkedIn, ...). The origin was Twitter, where some of my friends were sharing links from time to time in their accounts; but, you know, maybe you are reading the web, you see things that are interesting and you start posting them. The result is that in a short period of time you see a lot of links from you friend (good if you have time at that moment and can check them; bad if you are paying attention to other things and you forget about it). When I decided to share my own links I thought that it would be nice to do this along the day with two obectives: to not contaminate the timeline of my followers with a sudden burst of links, and to allow some of them to see a link at an appropriate moment and, maybe, if they were interested they could check other previously posted links. I started with some external tools and later I developed my own (see for example, So, you want to publish in Bluesky with a python program?) but I wanted to keep a record of them in some more permanent place (social networks are becoming less and less reliable, difficult to find, ...) so I decided to setup a linkblog.
You can check some steps in the process in this X thread (in Spanish). Voy a probar a hacer un linkblog con gemini, poniendo los enlaces que publico en redes sociales. A ver qué sale. First of all, I modified my publishing programs to keep a (local) copy of each link published modulePublicationCache and then I thought about using it for my linkblog.
I like very much jekyll for a blog and I requested to some AIs (mainly Qwen and Gemini) to help me to develop a blog based on the links I has posted the previous day, prepare a list with them, and prepare a Jekyll post. I also requested to set up a site, following my 'corporative' look and feel from my other sites and, voilà! It started coding, the list_links_by_date.py program which generates the list of links, prepares the markdown jekyll post, the daily_post.sh, which calls the previous program and makes the 'administrative' stuff: add, commit, push, ....
I requested them to add a README.md and the thing started publishing (using a VPS server I have and a cron job) and generating the fernand0's linkblog under my domain, hosting it using GitHub pages. I haven't paid much attention to it but it published reliably each night the daily post (it has failed once for some GitHub problem). Some ideas about the process: The result? fernand0's linkblog. I'm sharing like a dozen of links each night. The following steps could be: Templates let you quickly answer FAQs or store snippets for re-use. Are you sure you want to hide this comment? It will become hidden in your post, but will still be visible via the comment's permalink. Hide child comments as well For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse CODE_BLOCK:
15 0 * * * $HOME/usr/src/web/deGitHub/linkblog/scripts/daily_post.sh Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode CODE_BLOCK:
15 0 * * * $HOME/usr/src/web/deGitHub/linkblog/scripts/daily_post.sh CODE_BLOCK:
15 0 * * * $HOME/usr/src/web/deGitHub/linkblog/scripts/daily_post.sh - It was impressive to see it create a new Jekyll site for you, and it was a bit more of work to request for changes in order to obtain the desired look and feel.
- The program part is quite simple, almost any junior programmer could do it, but it is the sort of things that you do not start because there is a not so short list of small things that are easy to do but you always have other things that need more attention.
- The AIs can help you with the steps to configure everything. With this basic (free) versions you'll need to follow the steps (they won't do for you everything) but it is quite easy.
- Sometimes when vibecoding one feels as shepherding: you give instrucctions to the tool and you need to pay attention to what it is doing in order to get what you want.
- It is easy to test 'whatifs': what if I write the list in such a way? What if you generate this in this alternative way? - Generate an email with these links and send them to anybody interested (I started something like this with Revue, the newsletter tool that allowed you to create a mailing list with your posts, which was bought and closed as a service Twitter shuts down Revue, its newsletter platform).
- Improving my linkblog with some comments about each link: it would be some manual work (I wouldn't like to add an AI generated abstract, that's not the idea). If I found an easy way to extract/write some ideas when reading the articles (I'm posting links to sites that I've actually read, or, sometimes, that I will read) it could be attached to the links, but I need to think a bit more about how to manage this.
- More cosmetic improvements (could the main page show the latest posts and then a list of the other posts? Maybe we should add pagination?,...)