Contents
Hello. I'm Hanageruge.
Behind-the-scenes note before anything else: the text this post grew out of was spoken, not typed. Give today's AI a stream of whatever comes to mind and it hands back something readable. That kind of "wait, we can already do that?" is too much fun, and at some point I noticed I was playing with AI every single day. That's where I am now.
And since none of that playing was written down anywhere, it felt like a waste. So I built this blog.
So who is Hanageruge?
Hanageruge is the name I'll be going by. Day to day I work freelance, on things involving the web and AI.
There is a second side to it: I hold a Japanese national licence as a judo therapist, so I also do work related to health. For the record, I passed that exam without cheating.
Underneath it all is a gadget habit. When a new tool or service appears, I can't settle until I've tried it. I used to do a lot of live streaming, running the technical side of online seminars, and video editing. Plugging equipment together, something breaking, sweating just before going live. That genre.
And now the audio and video I used to handle for streaming can largely be made by AI. Transcription, narration, even generating the video. My past self wouldn't believe it.
I've built and played with a lot of things
Making websites has been a long-running hobby. I've run blogs on WordPress, and built one with Astro. For hosting I've wandered through Vercel, shared hosting like Xserver, and VPSs, depending on what interested me at the time.
So: not a believer in any particular service. I've just kept repeating "build it with whatever looks most interesting right now."
Why Cloudflare this time
This time the move is to Cloudflare. The reasons are simple: it's what people are talking about, and the free tier is generous enough to be a good fit for personal experiments.
There's an honest practical reason too. I use services like Vercel and Supabase for client work, so I can't write about anything that touches those projects here. Better to set up a place, separate from work, where I'm learning from zero and can write freely. That's why Cloudflare.
This blog is experiment number one running on it. The building process is going into the series Building this blog.
What this blog does (three pillars)
Build things while learning Cloudflare. Starting with growing this blog, then whatever else I think of, on top of Cloudflare. Where a beginner trips, a post gets written on the spot.
Study notes on AI tools. "This AI could do this", "for this job the other one is better", published as the study notes they are. Compared, actually used, written honestly.
Audio, video, gadgets, and hobbies now and then. Voice input, making video with AI, whatever gadget caught my eye. Plus, probably, the hobbies and entertainment I follow anyway. I've decided this part gets to be a mixed bag.
Audio in particular gets a bit obsessive. The number of microphones lying around my home is not small. Wireless mics, condensers, dynamics, bone-conduction earphones, dedicated devices for AI transcription: I could open a small shop with the mics alone. The things you can do with only your voice keep multiplying, and audio content is having a moment, so I plan to take a run at that here eventually.
One theme runs under all three pillars. As someone who has worked in health: AI has made things convenient, fine, but what has actually got better in people's lives, and what hasn't? Where does it go from here? I want to write past the tools and into that.
What I won't write, and what this blog promises
- No inside view of client work. Detailed accounts of services I handle professionally won't appear here
- Not a textbook. "What happened when I actually touched it" beats comprehensive coverage
- Failures get posts too. As the home page says, I'm being fairly honest about it
- No inflated numbers. I won't claim to have used something I haven't
This blog was built with AI too
There's a small voxel workshop on the home page. That isn't stock art: the room, the furniture and my character are all assembled and exported by code. From design questions through to implementation, I worked on it with AI.
Connecting the domain hanageruge.com happened only yesterday. Right after the switch, the rest of the world could see the new blog while my own Mac kept showing the old site. That kind of "you only learn it by doing it" is going to be the main material for this blog.
Let's learn this together
So: Hanageruge's Workshop is open.
I'm not a teacher, I'm the person who tried it slightly earlier. Let's poke at things, compare them, fail occasionally, and get a bit friendlier with AI.
Next post: what Cloudflare actually is. Written as if explaining it to the version of me who hadn't signed up yet.
