Building a minimalistic social hub page with 5 AI credits
I've been a user of Unstoppable Domains from some time and it caught my eye the announcement of an AI-powered site builder. I've been thinking about building a static page with some fundamentals about me to build some media presence and trying this tool seemed to be a good exercise. I wasn't ready to pay for AI credits, so I decided to attempt to get something visually pleasing with the 5 free credits I got for using it for the first time.
It wasn't too hard. I just told the chatbot to use a template (Tech Startup), my full name and that I'm a backend software engineer. I also provided what my 3 meaningful social links: Github, LinkedIn and Stack Overflow (more about this later). As you can see, I'm not really a social media expert.
The first draft was OK but it didn't really reflect my personality. So I changed the template to "Cyberphunk Terminal". And voila, I got something pretty decent for my taste without any design knowledge and for only 2.6 credits. Publishing the site to one of your domains (a web3 domain in this case) takes one extra credit, so I ended up with 1.4 credits left after the first publication. Since I used a web3 domain, I had to sign a message with my wallet to do the publication.
This is the link I got. You can check the results there. It uses IPFS to host the static content, which is a technology I like a lot but the URL is pretty long and unreadable.
A URL shortener to the rescue
To get a shorter and more readable URL for my page without doing anything too complex, I just created an account in short.io, a URL shortener that has a decent free tier. I linked it to my custom domain fase5.com.ar, and I created this shorter link very easily: https://l.fase5.com.ar/lucas.
So far I spent probably less that two hours in this including my thinking process. But then things got a bit complicated.
Adding a new link
As I said, I'm not really a "social media" guy. Putting your Stack Overflow profile is probably not very appealing anymore since the arrival of the AI boom. So I decided to add a link to my Hashnode blog and change a couple of very small details. It seemed like something that could be done with 1.4 AI credits, right?
Well, no. The chatbot failed to make the new link readable in the existing design and I ran out of credits. You can see the code and edit it manually by clicking a button. But since I ran out of credits to publish the changes, I decided to leave my new social media hub as it is, for now.
Another option would be to take the code and publish it to IPFS using a different service, but I won't do that for now.
Conclusion
I consider this little experiment a successful one, but there is room for improvement.
Even though I decided not to pay for extra AI credits yet, I find odd that Unstoppable Domains doesn't allow to pay for these credits with crypto (as it does with the credit used to buy domains). This is something I explicitly asked the AI assistant and it told me that currently is not possible. But I wouldn't be suprised if Unstoppable Domains changes this in the near future.
The new AI site builder made by Unstopable Domains is an interesting tool that can build a visually appealing website pretty easily and fast.