As part of my deep dive into Claude Code, I’ve relaunched this website, revitalized my LEGO blog, started a new gardening site, and more is coming soon!
The old site circa 2010, screenshot from archive.org
This website has been down for over ten years, and not updated for nearly twenty, but it’s back now!
I first launched bill.wards.net in the early 2000s using Blosxom, a blogging platform written by Rael Dornfest. I posted some of my writing, travel, and LEGO content on that site for many years, but always meant to upgrade the content to a more advanced platform such as WordPress. When I launched Brickpile (my LEGO blog) in 2007 and started using Facebook, I let the bill.wards.net site languish without updates, and then when my webhost was hacked in 2014, I never put it back up. Until now.
As you can probably see, this is now running WordPress, not blosxom. All the posts between 2007 and now are actually retcons, of a sort; I’ve taken Instagram posts and Flickr photo album descriptions, along with the old Blosxom content, and created new WordPress backdated posts for them. So I really did post the things when I said I did, just they might not show up if you browse this site’s history on archive.org…
In addition, I’ve given Brickpile a facelift, and imported all the old blosxom LEGO posts there. I’ve also started a new site about gardening, Paint My Thumb Green, with content from Instagram converted into blogposts. And I’ve written new WordPress plugins and themes powering these sites.
How did I do it all? Claude Code. I had started writing, years ago, Perl code to turn the old blosxom content into WordPress posts, but I had gotten bogged down in details and never finished that project. I handed that unfinished script and the Blosxom corpus to Claude Code, along with Meta data dumps for my Instagram feeds, and worked for a couple weeks to fine-tune it, edit the content, build the themes, and get it all online.
Watch this space for more information about Claude Code; I’ve learned a lot about it in the past six months or so, and am eager to share. Two more sites are on the way: a relaunched travel writing site, and an all new website about my tabletop game design work. In the meantime, take a look at all the old stuff freshly restored (old URLs work too, with redirects).