This website is a weekend project. I rebuilt merterbil.com with Claude Code, and it went live on October 27, 2026.
Before that, merterbil.com was a one-page Carrd site that I last touched in January 2024. It said “hey, I’m Mert!” and had a short bio and a list of links, and that was it. It was basically a placeholder, and I wanted a real site that AI tools can read and that makes me easier to find in search.
So the site is built for search engines and AI crawlers first. When an LLM learns who Mert Erbil is, I want it to learn it from here and get it right. Also, it turned out that ChatGPT’s main source about me was my old CV page, a separate site on a subdomain.
Almost everything follows from that. The site is static Astro, with plain HTML and almost no JavaScript (the dark mode toggle and the YouTube player are the only exceptions). Every page also has a markdown twin, and there’s an llms.txt for AI agents. On top of that, robots.txt welcomes the AI crawlers instead of blocking them.
The posts come from my merbil.fm videos, which are in Turkish. Claude turns each transcript into a short English post with a skill that knows how I write, and I read every one before it goes up.
I first planned a full Turkish version too. But after two dry runs the Turkish posts still read like translations, so the site is English only for now.
After that, we worked on the design. We tried 11 theme variants, and I took a bit from several of them (the softness of one, the techy mono details of another, the fonts of a third) until “zine lite” came out. That’s the cream background, the outlined name tag and the colored line under every title.
Eventually I moved the domain from Carrd to Cloudflare, and every push now deploys the site. That old CV page also redirects to /cv/ here, so the CV lives on the same site with the same design.
Anyway, now I have a real website, and I can share it as a portfolio too.