The Modern Web is Broken. It’s Time to Build Our Own!
10/24/2025
Why the Modern Web Feels Off
The internet is broken! Both in terms of the base architecture and how it’s used. Corporate data aggregation, surveillance, and use of your personal data become creepier and more disturbing each day. Corporate interests are fain to sell your information, your friends, and your thoughts, to the highest bidder. This is functionally wrong and goes against the original concept of the internet. That is why I built a digital ark for my thoughts and data, one that I control.
When I set off to build a website, I did not realize just how broken the web is. My goal was to build a simple static page where I could air out my thoughts, and they would last indefinitely after I was done. A place my children, or grandchildren could go to read my thoughts and feel like they got to know me a little more. Something they could access, use, and manipulate in the future. No place or product like that exists today.
There are structures in place to help with archiving. For instance, the Wayback Machine is like a time machine for data, but it is slow and continuously threatened by financial and legal challenges. You also don’t control it. The closest thing to a forever archive people can fully control are old static HTML websites from the early 90's, like the first ever webpage at: https://info.cern.ch/
Nobody wants to code static pages by hand though. I figured there were tools I could use to painlessly host a website. WordPress is a top contender, but I doubted whether it would still be functional after a year, much less a decade or two. WordPress is potentially the most powerful and extensible, Cross Site Scripting (XSS) Vulnerability Emulator on the planet. It's like buying a McMansion, remodeling, moving in, and finding out the framework is infested with termites.
While WordPress offers an open ecosystem with a plethora of useful plug-ins, it can be overly complex and invites abuse. And while WordPress is available in free forms, you would be unwise to run a free version on your own, where you are responsible for updates and issues. Even trying to restore an old backup years later can give you considerable issues.
My AI Teammate is The Least Risky Path
I desire something I can understand, troubleshoot, and update on by myself. A simple static, but elegant webpage. Something I can develop my posts in Outlook, Word, or Notes and paste into the web. Text and code do not go stale easily, and even years later can be imported, updated, and will compile and run. I decided to build a Node.js webapp with posts stored in a human-readable flat-file format, not trapped behind some arcane encryption scheme. I’ll be honest, this project grew larger than expected. It was so easy to build that I just kept adding more features.
Keeping costs low was prerogative number one for keeping availability high. If it costs a lot to host, it won’t be there for long. I considered subcontracting out the coding work to local developers, but that is cost prohibitive in the USA. Foreign software developers can be more affordable Yet, ensuring any foreign code is free of back doors, misappropriated code, and other vulnerabilities is challenging and time consuming. It's also hard to know if the final product would be any better or worse.
As a Cyber Risk practitioner, those risks were too high for me to accept. Paid versions of ChatGPT and Gemini provide some level of protection for your business data. They state they will not use your data to train their models without explicitly telling you. After reviewing their policies, I concluded using AI would likely be the least risky path.
The Free Web Used Like Legos
The goal was to design a professional site, using professional tools, but with zero startup cost. There is an overabundance of free services available for the beginner. Below is a blueprint for a free development and Web Stack that fits together in a Lego-like fashion. This makes it easy to replicate and change as needed. The current stack uses:
VSCode for my IDE (free code editor)
GitHub as the online code repo (free cloud code storage)
Vercel for hosting the Node.js app (free fast hosting)
Firebase as the data store (free cloud database)
For the curious, Render was trialed too, but Vercel offered more consistent load times over Render in my testing. It also seamlessly took care of the update and deploy mechanism.
My Simple 5-step Process to Post
Posting an article is simple:
Save an updated draft in the post generator
Export the post as a human readable HTML/MDX file
Drop the file in the GitHub projects content folder
Sync to GitHub
Vercel automatically builds and deploys the latest version of the web app
Firebase is utilized as the database to store the posts in JSON format, along with some other features and settings, but this is all behind-the-scenes. If needed the DB can be swapped out for any DB technology.
The domain is protected with Cloudflare, and both Cloudflare and Cloudinary provide CDN (Content Delivery Network) services. These services help improve performance while stopping potential threats and abuse. All this, so in a decade or two my kids and others can read these posts...
These technologies and services were chosen to integrate with because they are free for low usage and showcasing them allowed me to learn. If the site gets busy, they can be moved to paid versions. AI makes it easy to integrate with any technology or service. Want to change providers or host yourself, just ask AI for instructions to change it and it will help you through each step.
Building a Foundation for the Future
I am just a normal person with an ability to ask good questions. Working with AI allowed me to learn a lot while building this site. This is an area where AI really shines right now, not as a replacement coder, but as a teacher and a teammate. It assists in both roles, which shines light on how the future might operate.
With AI, I was able to tackle this solo project over a few months of my spare time. This has set me up with a core foundation for building any app or site I want. For scope, this webapp is comprised of:
148 files
8,370 Non-empty Lines of Code (LOC)
463 functions
14 API route handlers
15 Next.js pages
6 custom hooks.
I estimate this previously would have consumed 2-6 months of work for a developer, or 1-2 months for a small team. Anyone can tap into this level of productivity improvement once AI becomes part of your workflow. These changes coupled with AI advancements will continue to snowball into the future. In just a few years, building custom tools like this for yourself will be even easier.
AI helped me create this webapp, which is useful for much more than just hosting this site. I still need to finish some placeholders, such as advertising and comments, but I can build any site with this core foundation. If you like what I am building and want to use it yourself, Sign up for my newsletter below and message me through the contact page. I’d love to hear what you would build with it! I can easily customize this webapp for you or your company.
If 10,000 people sign up, I'll package it for free personal use. It would be awesome if someday everyone ran their own online community space on this platform or an interoperable one, free from creepy spying corporations and governments. This isn’t nostalgia for the way the web once was, it’s evolution. AI is quietly rebuilding the personal web, one project at a time.
To close, it is not about code counts and technology, it’s about building something sustainable. Putting out something useful and lasting. Leaving an impactful piece of yourself behind in the world. AI can help us all build that spot. So, stop scrolling and start building.
Below is a behind-the-scenes preview of what AI helped me build:
Homepage
Admin Dashboard
Post Generator
Subscriber Manager
Newsletter Generator / Mailer
