Updated: 2025-01-17
This website was created by Matteo Cervelli using a mix of personal skills and AI. I previously had a website hosted and built on WordPress, but I decided to rebuild it myself in early 2025 to “keep control”.
I wanted a lightweight, fast, and responsive website. And I wanted to learn the basics by leveraging what technology has to offer.
First of all, matteocervelli.com is a static website. It’s built with Hugo as SSG—Static Site Generator—and is hosted on Netlify via GitHub, while DNS is managed through Cloudflare.
My passion for Markdown comes from a recent transition of all my management to Obsidian, which I had been “sniffing around” for years until I finally decided to make the switch.
But I couldn’t have built the site without two formidable AI assistants: Claude 3.5-sonnet and Cursor. Cursor has completely changed my life, while Claude is the best possible learning assistant.
For more information on how I use AI for the site, you can read here.
It’s only thanks to them that a WordPress XML export was enough to have the entire site in Markdown, organized by folders, through a Python Script.
Today, I write my texts in Markdown, in multiple languages, through Obsidian where I’ve built the site structure, and then I build them via Terminal (directly in Cursor) on the Hugo folder. For someone coming from a closed CMS system, having everything on my PC is incredibly liberating. Obviously, with continuous backup to Cloud and NAS.
The theme is based on Ananke, where I made personal modifications to both style and structure.
The color palette used is:
- MC Purple: #AF00BF
- MC Peach Light: #FFE8D1
- MC Black: #303030
The Fonts are two of my companions:
Other tools I use to manage the site and my personal activity:
- Google Workspace for managing Email and digital Drive, plus documentation.
- In Obsidian, I’ve rebuilt CRM and documentation management and task manager/project manager, so I don’t need other software at the moment when I’m working alone.
- Kit for collecting contacts and sending newsletters
- Stripe for managing payments.
- Fiscozen (for Italian VAT numbers) for accounting — Affiliate.
- Umami Analytics for analytics
- Canva for graphics
- Clop for image optimization
- Unsplash for stock images
Final note: A huge Thank you to Steph Ango, both for his work on Obsidian and for the design and logic of his blog from which mine takes much inspiration.