Aaron VanSledright

Tag: wordpress

  • Why I built my own WordPress Platform

    Why I built my own WordPress Platform

    I’ve been building websites for a long time. I remember learning HTML and Microsoft FrontPage as my first website builder. It was such a fun time to be creating horrific looking websites back in the early 2000s. As the internet progressed so did my skills and back in 2016 I formed my company 45Squared to build websites for small businesses. My whole goal is to be your trusted resource when it comes to being online.

    When I started the company I built WordPress websites of various shapes and sizes but they always ran on AWS. This helped me expand my AWS skills as well as provide robust infrastructure for my client’s websites to live on. I managed the website and the underlying infrastructure for a small monthly cost that beat the competition. The result, a bunch of paying customers a decent side hustle.

    As time went on, selling became harder and the race to zero for cost was apparent. So, as the AI boom is on, I decided that it was time to automate the site building process.

    I started documenting out how I would want this to work. Fully automated website deployments, design, content, custom domains, good SEO base and deployed FAST!

    Enter https://ai.45sq.net. This platform is fully automated. The customer can provide inputs and descriptions of what they want as well as photos or other graphical content. The workflow takes all of the inputs and builds a fully functional WordPress website hosted on AWS. The user can easily point their own domain to the server and setup automatic payments. They then get full administrative access to their website so they can expand and add features just like any other WordPress site.

    So why did I build this?

    If you contact a web designer now you will have to pay them to build up the initial design, work with their timelines, end up with something that needs revisions and your time to live will be in the weeks not minutes.

    The platform I built for 45Squared eliminates the need for the initial design fees and focuses on getting you online quickly. Its great for small businesses who are just getting started.

    So now when I get a request to build a site I can tell the customer that I have two options. First, fully custom. I’m still willing to sit with you and build out the picture perfect website. Or, two, you can launch your own and I will still support the website and help you with your online presence.

    So that’s it. An easy to use WordPress website launcher. Running on enterprise grade cloud. With content, design, layout and all the rest handled by the magic of Claude Opus.

    Try it out: https://ai.45sq.net. No contracts. No weird fees. Get online today.

  • I built a WordPress Plugin For Generating Images With Nano Banana

    An image of a blogger who takes himself way too seriously for his own good.

    AI is every where. Accept it. Anyway, I had a random thought last night about having a WordPress plugin that allows you to generate images on the fly for your posts. Pictures increase engagement on posts so, what if we just inline Nano Banana directly into Gutenberg?

    This morning I built this plugin which is a simple API call to Google’s Gemini AI Studio through a Gutenberg block.

    1. Type your prompt
    2. Choose your model
    3. Hit generate
    4. Insert

    Simple!

    Nano Banana Image Generator block

    Once the image is inserted into the post it turns the block into a standard image block so its as easy to manage as any other image.

    I submitted the plugin to the official WordPress repository but it takes a while to get approved. So, if you want to add it to your own WordPress instance feel free to message me and I’ll give you access to the repository!

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  • Building in Public – The Automated WordPress Deployment Platform Part 2

    Building in Public – The Automated WordPress Deployment Platform Part 2

    A few days ago I wrote about building an automated WordPress deployment platform using Terraform and AI. Well, i’m happy to report that the entire platform is live and ready for you to explore and launch your own WordPress website.

    Introducing 45Squared’s WordPress deployment platform powered by Ubuntu and Claude. Try it out today at https://ai.45sq.net.

    Let’s talk about how this all works.

    The front end infrastructure that an end user will see is pretty straightforward. I am utilizing an ECS cluster and NextJS to deliver the end user experience. The second portion of the user experience is handled by an AWS API Gateway to manage all of the user credentials, payment processing, sit launch status. Authentication is handled by AWS Cognito. Hate on it all you want, Cognito works just fine when configured correctly.

    Frontend architecture

    Behind the scenes, once a user transaction has completed successfully, the website is provisioned using another ECS task. This container runs through a sequence of steps to provision the AWS EC2 instance for the user to utilize. Each tenant instance is running a hardened Ubuntu image that is built using Packer. I will cover this in another post. Throughout the provisioning process, the task is updating the DynamoDB table so that the user gets a live look into how their website is progressing.

    Provisioning architecture

    Each tenant is given a subdomain as well as the ability to utilize a custom domain name. Each tenant is also given a Cloudfront CDN for global static content distribution. And of course, each tenant receives their own SSL certificate for both their custom domain and their subdomain.

    Each site can be managed by SSM which will eventually be linked into an AI agent for management through Slack or another messaging platform.

    I don’t intend to use this platform to compete with the large players. 45Squared’s vision has always been to serve the small to medium size businesses who want personalized support while still receiving an amazing product. This platform gives them the ability to quickly launch a website and get their company on the world wide web within 10 minutes.

    If you are interested in building out a website using the platform the first few users can receive 50% using code “BETATESTER50”. There are limited redemption so be sure to get going quickly!

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