yet another weblog migration

October 31, 2026

I created this site in 2003 as much to learn how to deploy my own site as to start blogging. I thought I would write about mostly technical stuff, but my random musings outpace my posts about code.

Almost 6 years ago, I punted on yet another migration by posting a snapshot of the website with the idea of migrating to a static site generator. Now at last the ultrasaurus has surfaced as a live site once again.

The process

This migration took a few days with a bit of help from Claude. Much of the detailed fixing required attention from my brain. I recalled that the msn_ducks image on the Wayback Machine was something I actually blogged about, which revealed that the Movable Type to WordPress migration had truncated 9 posts, each cut off at the first Windows-1252 character, usually a curly apostrophe, that WordPress’s import couldn’t read. And I had actually noticed the data loss way back then, since the behavioral demographics post included:

“[Update: the end of this post seems to have been lost in the mists of time…]”

which is now replaced with the real ending.

Claude thought my post about the Pirahã language was lost; I remembered it had just been renamed: Learning from the Pirahã language. I also had a few random directories with files that had been lost from my many server moves. It was fun to resurrect old writings like "The Future of the Web is not the Past of Windows" linked from enabling freedom of expression.

I didn't record all the upgrades, there were many for each platform — sometimes new versions of the same software can be as big as moving to different software. (See renovations may take a while.) I guess I abandoned the "tag cloud" and haven't kept up with tagging. Comments are now static. I loved having comments, yet could not keep up with the spam. Maybe someday I'll find a good way to bring them back.

Same job, 17 years apart: a 2009 Ruby script turned old pages into .htaccess redirects. In 2026, Python scripts, written by my AI friend Claude, turned Wayback copies into Cloudflare’s _redirects. Both worked from the old pages’ titles.

Of course, there was opportunity for yet another redesign: I added some color and the amazing ultrasaurus portrait by artist Judah Nero.

Illustration of the ultrasaurus, a green dinosaur with purple hair in a blue robe, holding a wooden staff topped by a computer mouse with its cable winding around the staff plugged into a laptop with Cloud Native Security raccoon and chevron logo, lightning comes out of the laptop and arcs over the dinosaur with logos of past projects: Flash, Firebase, Bridge Foundry, Smithsonian, After Effects, Mightyverse, Great Unsung Women of Computing, TV from After Effects 1.0 brochure, RailsBridge, Presidential Innovation Fellows, and CoSA.
Artist: Judah Nero

Reflections

I don't know if my home grown static site generator will stand the test of time. The key motivation of this migration is that all the posts are in pure markdown, which is a format that I believe will stick around.

Interesting Stats