17 years of hosting KillrBuckeye
I've hosted Killrbuckeye's guitar site since 2009. Relaunched in 2020. Now it's 2026 and I've migrated it to a static Astro build on Cloudflare — using AI to redesign, see the em-dash? ;), without losing the content or the spirit of the original site.
How I ended up hosting a metal guitarist
In the summer of 2009 a youtuber I watched — KillrBuckeye, a metal guitarist — was running his site off a box at his house. His home IP was dynamic, so every time it changed he had to go re-point his DNS or the site dropped offline. As a young developer that was to start college, I was deep into web development, and this was an obviously fixable problem. I offered to host it for free on my DreamHost account.
The starting point
Seventeen years later, I still host it. There was a redesign in 2020 when he came back to YouTube. This is the 2026 pass — the one where I wanted to see how much better I could do it now that I have access to AI design tools.
In the 2020 redesign I had ported the old PHP site to 11ty, a static site generator. It was hosted on the legacy version of Cloudflare Pages. It worked, but honestly the design wasn’t great. It may not have been ugly, but it sure wasn’t pretty.
The goal was to keep all of the original content that Chris had made all those years ago and give it a new coat of paint.
Letting AI do the design pass
AI is both a powerful tool and easily abused to generate slop. Even writing this article I’ve run into the issue that it’s spitting out a lot of generic wording that isn’t really specific to the content.
I tried out Claude Design for a few other projects and it was decent but I wasn’t getting the results I really wanted. Add onto the fact that it’s very token hungry and it’s not very motivating.
Next I tried Google Stitch. It was surprisingly more polished than Claude, though it had a lot of tell tale signs of being AI. The same purples and glows that have become known in AI-generated design. Just like the em-dashes in the first paragraph of this case study.
5 or 6 design interations later I had a color scheme that was looking good and a style that I thought fit the content well. What it output for all the screens wasn’t perfect, but it was a good starting point. I had claude adapt the 11ty project into a new astro project. The main gaurdrail was not using the content in the design but using the spirit of the design. This worked surprisingly well.
The division of labor mattered. Stitch was good at proposing a coherent look fast; Claude was good at the unglamorous part — moving 17 years of content into a typed, componentized codebase without dropping pieces on the floor.
The result was a lovely redesign that looked much better than what I could have done myself.
Where it landed
The site is now a static Astro build on Cloudflare Pages. Content lives in collections, so the pages are effectively free to serve and fast everywhere. The blog is no longer a single page so if we ever need to add new posts it’s so much easier to do so. The content is also much less duplicated so I don’t have to take a new blog post and add it to both the home page as well as the blog page.
Seventeen years and counting. \m/