• hello
• how I built this

Hello, welcome, and how I built this from the command line

A calm hello, and a short note on how this site got built one prompt at a time.

Hello

Hi, I'm Mallory. the MEOWER-PLATFORM is a small, calm corner for Power Platform makers and Dynamics 365 admins and consultants who like to try things, tweak things, and share what worked. Drifter and Floofers run the vibe department. And honestly, if you know me, you already knew I was going to anchor this whole thing around the cats. Most people know and love them more than they know me, and that math checks out.

I have been saying I would launch a blog for over ten years. Ten.

I'd think about it, get overwhelmed by the setup, talk myself out of it, and go do something else. The GitHub Copilot CLI is the thing that finally made it impossibly easy to just do it.

So this is the first post. I want to do two things here: say hello, and share how this site actually came together. Because honestly, the building process is the brand. I didn't open a design tool or scaffold a framework. I opened a terminal and started prompting.

What I wanted

A personal home that felt calm and looked like me. Easy to update. Cheap to run. Built in a way that matched how I actually like to work: by describing what I want, trying it, looking at the result, and tweaking one thing at a time.

Before I wrote a single line of HTML, I'd already put together a brand guide for the MEOWER-PLATFORM. Colors, voice, the two cats and their personalities, what does and doesn't fit. When I sat down to build the site, I pointed the GitHub Copilot CLI at that document and basically said, here's the brand, go for it. That one move set the tone for everything that followed.

First try

From there it was just a calm conversation, like talking to a coworker who happens to be very fast at typing. "Make me a homepage with a cream background, one purple accent, and a hero spot for the cats." It built the file. I opened it in the browser. Drifter side-eyed the spacing. I asked for a tweak.

That's the whole loop. No project setup, no opinionated framework, no eight-hour configuration ritual. Just: describe the vibe, see what comes back, keep what works, tweak what doesn't.

One tweak

The biggest unlock was leaning into the CLI for the boring parts too, not just the creative ones. Same calm conversation, but it turned out it also handled the full pile of plumbing underneath a real website.

A short list of things it handled for me, no clicking required:

• Microsoft Entra ID setup. Spun up a new tenant for meowerplatform.com, walked me through verifying the custom domain, generated the exact DNS records I needed, and told me where to paste them. When Azure threw a 503, it noticed before I did.
• GitHub. Created the private repo, set up .gitignore, made every commit, wrote sensible commit messages, and pushed. When I wanted a second repo for a small utility, it scaffolded that one too.
• Cloudflare DNS and Pages. Confirmed the right record types, the right targets, and the right proxy settings. Caught a redirect loop that was actually a SSL setting and pointed me at the fix.
• A small Cloudflare Worker. When I wanted a passphrase gate on the site, the CLI wrote the Worker code, installed wrangler, helped me set the secrets, and deployed it. Then it pushed that code to its own GitHub repo too.
• Bulk content tweaks. "Rename the Links page to Connect everywhere on the site." "Move DynamicsCon into Past sessions, add two placeholders for Community Summit." Sweeping changes that would normally mean fifteen open tabs and a careful find-and-replace got handled in a single line.
• The brand guide stayed the source of truth. Anytime the voice drifted or I broadened the brand, I asked the CLI to update the brand guide first, then update the site to match. That kept the document and the site in sync instead of arguing with each other.

My job through all of it was small: read the result, point at the parts that felt off, ask for one tweak at a time. The CLI did the file edits, ran git, configured services, and shipped. Cloudflare picked up the change and redeployed.

It felt less like coding and more like editing out loud. Which is exactly the vibe I want this whole place to have.

New result

A living site I can shape with a sentence. When something looks wrong, I say so. When I want a new page, I describe it. When the brand voice drifts, I pull it back with one prompt. The cats stay on brand because the rules live in plain English, not in a config file.

A few honest notes from Drifter's side-eye along the way:

• Going slow paid off. One change at a time, one prompt at a time. When I tried to bundle three changes into one ask, the result was always a little off in a way that took longer to fix than just doing it in three turns.
• Saying what I didn't want was as useful as saying what I did. "Keep it calm." "No corporate vibes." "Not that, try again."
• The CLI was happy to be told it was wrong. No defensiveness, no apologies. Just: okay, here is the tweak.

A small accessibility pass

After the site felt right, I asked the CLI to bring in a specialized agent: the Accessibility Expert (opens in new tab) from GitHub's awesome-copilot library. It reads the actual HTML and CSS, runs them against WCAG 2.1 and 2.2 standards, and gives back a prioritized list of issues with specific code fixes.

A few things it caught on the first pass:

• Body-text links relied on color alone, so I added underlines.
• No skip link for keyboard users to bypass the nav.
• External links opened in new tabs without warning screen reader users.
• Focus indicators were the browser default and easy to miss.

A few minutes later, the CLI had patched all of it. The site now passes WCAG 2.1 AA. The brand library got a new accessibility baseline so this stays intact as the site grows.

If you want to use the same agent, it's free and open. Grab accessibility.agent.md (opens in new tab) from the awesome-copilot repo, drop it into your .github/agents/ folder (or ~/.copilot/agents/ for user-wide), and it shows up as an option you can call from the CLI. Awesome-copilot has a bunch of others worth a look too.

What's next

Honestly? Not sure yet, and that's okay. This place is meant to fill in slowly, the same way it got built: one small try at a time. When something feels worth sharing, I'll write it down. Until then, the cats are happy to just be here.

If you've tried something small with a prompt and want to share, the door is open over on the Connect page. Bring your prompt, your tweak, and your favorite small win.

See you in the next experiment.