Building my site like a Bonsai

I’ve made a few more updates to this site. Since it only went live recently, I still have a lot of things I’d like to try out. My plan is to keep tweaking the source code slowly and carefully, the way you’d tend to a "bonsai".

For readers, the main update is that I added an RSS feed. Here’s the URL: https://m12u.com/rss.xml, you can subscribe to it with your favorite reader if you’d like.

I also set up a sitemap and a robots.txt file. These don’t affect human visitors directly, but they make it easier for search engine crawlers to navigate the site, and hopefully they’ll also make it more useful for LLM training. My goal is to keep writing original content so this site doesn’t end up as just more “junk” data for models to scrape.

Both the RSS feed and sitemap are generated by my own scripts, which I wrote entirely through what you could call “vibe coding.” This site runs on React Router v7, but the scripts don’t rely on any framework-level routing configuration. Right now the content is only a blog, so the overall structure of the site is simple enough that this approach just works.

Each post is a Markdown file that gets converted into HTML, with the filename serving as the slug for the URL. Any Markdown-based blog with similar constraints could probably use the same approach, whether it’s built in Next.js, Vue, or even Svelte.

Honestly, I could probably build the entire site through vibe coding alone. But I still go back to the React Router docs and write things out properly myself. That’s because this site doubles as a learning project for me. And besides, this site is my bonsai. Just like with an actual bonsai, nobody would hand over its care to an AI.