This morning I was thinking again how I could convert my old blogposts from 2000 to 2005 to a more transferrable format. Like Markdown or Hugo. I once had them all converted to WordPress posts, but as it turns out, that’s not always the best way to go. Simple files makes it a lot easier. I still have an exact copy of the old blog punkey.com on my laptop, including all the individual posts in PHP. I wrote those in Pivot, a Dutch blogging CMS by the late great Bob den Otter. I figured it shouldn’t be that hard for Claude to help me out with some code to convert a few of these posts to Hugo-files I could use on this micro.blog. 4 Minutes later, I had 5 converted posts as a test on my laptop. Thanks to this simple Python script, made by Claude and it’s trainingsdata. This is so easy. The code may not be perfect, I will definitely run into errors and problems, but to have a pair-programmer like this by my side is what I always wanted.

I don’t have the time and bandwidth right now to finish this project. This morning we will leave for a short holiday break and visit some friends. But I already have tons of ideas I want to run by an LLM to see how it would turn out. For instance:

  • I should change everything to a Markdown export, since that is the way to import the files in micro.blog. And it’s even more readable for more apps, like Obsidian and iA writer
  • Could I also make some sort of uploading-process with the API of Micro.blog to convert, check and upload? And check again.
  • How would I deal with categories and tags? Maybe I should refer to my notes from the WordPress import.
  • Micro.blog also supports a WordPress import, but I have my doubts if that will work for my archive. I would also still like local individual Markdown files though. For my own archive.
  • How would I deal with redirects from old URL’s to my latest domain? I have no idea. I never really bothered. Maybe I should continue that vibe.
  • Yeah, I should.
  • How would I deal with images? I have a large amount of images and I would really like to have them on some sort of static server like a CDN. Putting them there is one thing. Referring to them in 20 year old blogposts is another.

While writing post this I had this peculiar thought I am known to have more and more: “Didn’t I do this already somewhere in the past?” And what do you know… in my blogpost The daunting task of importing 24 years of blogposts I already describe I have 17 Mb of individual Markdown posts. Now where did I put them?