Say what you will about AI, but it is performing a miracle for ol' dangerousmeta!

Converting old EE1, Zope/Python, WordPress, Movable Type, Statamic (my cursed obsession with trying every available system) to a friendly, readable, searchable static site is a success. It suggested PageFind for search, and now I have a truly useful full-blog search function. It’s building redirects so none of my other .blog, .rocks permalinks go dead. It even found the original Behind The Curtain site and background work files, including the participants I’d lost in the shuffle (as galleries disappeared in 2001, I removed the inactive ones. In retrospect, these are important historical markers. Restored.).

All archive contents are unchanged, except for design/format. Typos, programming glitches, preserved. I have the original MySQL databases for concrete proof. All email addresses of commenters are stripped, replaced with their blog URLs, if discoverable.

I’m extracting 1.5GB of files (750mb tarball) into a staging site to do a final test. I can’t wait for this to be online.

I let it summarize some paragraphs for me in “About” and “Weblog History”, I’ll have to rewrite those (terribly generic) with my own voice. But I am more than pleased.

I didn’t think I would ever get this all put together, much less in such a useful form.

As when I did the ‘insane thing’ and dove into working on ‘newfangled microcomputers’, or ‘whizzy video graphics’, or ‘writing on a web log’ … (note the antiquated space) … once again, I’m kicking the tires on new tech, AI, seeing what it is good for, and what it is not good for. I maintain, you can’t judge if you don’t torque it. My first reflex with every new technology is to see if I can break it. Take it to the limits.

YMMV. But you’ll have AI to thank for a usable DM! archive.