Reorganised website

I've been running a wordpress blog since 2009, and over the years wordpress has gotten more and more complex. What I want is a simple site, old-school personal diary style, and I don't really need any fancy AI bells and whistles.

So I figured I'd try and export my web stuff from wordpress and write something that converts it to static html. I mentioned this to the lovely Chris at sugarcube.co.uk (who runs my hosting), and he says... and I paraphrase ... "hello why don't you use Claude for that?"

So I said no, I want to do it by hand, and then time passed, and time passed, and eventually I do an agentic coding course and think: "Maybe I should try this stuff?". So I spun up Claude and got talking. Parsing the old blog, kinda easy. Identifying situations where there were broken images or embeds, also easy (I had some old youtube embeds on ancient posts which still used flash, whoops). I thought about the problem of search, and decided that TF/IDF-based indexing would do fine for a job of this scale. I suggested that to Claude who told me it was a brilliant idea. Everything I say is a brilliant idea to Claude. Maybe I really am brilliant? Or more likely, Claude is sycophantic.

Anyway, it did it and here we are - a static html blog generated offline. Less on-the-fly generation, build once read anywhere, lightweight, clean html. I think it's pretty good.

I don't think Claude did anything I couldn't do, but it did it all fast, and it spotted some gotchas I would probably have taken a little longer to identify. Very impressive.