Hello Chirpy!

In April 2025, I stumbled upon Bear and subscribed to its annual plan. Herman is very generous in providing a purchasing power parity (i.e., discounts) in his subscription plans.

If you want to start a minimal blog with minimal friction, I’d recommend using that blogging platform.

Why did I start using Jekyll again?

Two weeks ago, I lost control of my motorcycle on the way home. I sustained minor injuries (thank God!) however I can only walk with difficulty due to the swelling of my right leg.

I resigned immediately from work to recover from my injuries. I took it as a sign to withdraw from retail.

While recovering from my injuries, I had the time to face an adversary I had abandoned before stumbling upon Bear:

Jekyll, a static site generator that uses Ruby.

I used to link my domain name, michaelroxas.com, to GitHub pages with the former. The cost is low, as you only needed to pay for the domain name. However, it can be overwhelming to take this approach. It took a lot of my time debugging errors and set up the themes. In my defense, I didn’t have a technical background. I just knew that it was possible to do it. This was back in 2021.

Thanks to AI, I didn’t need to go through all that again. I could just ask it to give me a step-by-step guide on how to use Chirpy (the site you’re seeing now) and explain to me the potential errors I’d see in the process of setting it up.

Of course, my experience now is different from what it was when I tried Jekyll the first time. I now have more knowledge in Git (and GitHub), along with basic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I could interfere and manually edit things myself if AI wasn’t performing according to my expectations. Although I understand that this could be a skill issue, because my prompt wasn’t clear enough in giving instructions (mb).

Despite some deployment errors, it didn’t take long for me to set this up. We’re live!

What now?

I’m giving Chirpy the same chance I gave Bear: a year. If Chirpy and I don’t get along, I could always revert to Bear as my blogging platform.

In the meantime, Hello Chirpy!