I haven’t been blogging very much for the last couple of years. But lately I think I’d like to ease back into it. Maybe get up to a few posts per month.
To that end, I wanted to clean up the back-end of the site. The front end — the part that you see — may be minimalist and relatively clean, but the back end is a mess. Windypundit has been in operation for over 20 years, which has left a lot of debris behind. I wanted to clean that up.
I started by creating a work folder on my computer and launching the Visual Studio Code development environment. I have the Claude Code plugin installed, so I began by giving Claude some background about Windypundit and what I wanted to do with it. I had Claude put me through an interview process to develop a plan for what I wanted to change. We came up with a multi-step blog site renovation plan.
The first step was analysis of the existing website, so I installed an SSH Key, which gave Claude access to WordPress though the WP-CLI interface. That was enough for it to do a thorough inventory of Windypundit. Among other things, it classified all of my WordPress plugins. Some of them had been de-listed by WordPress (usually a bad sign) and a lot of them did things that had since been incorporated into core WordPress or otherwise made unnecessary. A few of them did things I no longer cared about. Some had been disabled for years.
The strangest finding was that I had an ATOM syndication feed left over from the days when the blog was built on Movable Type, which I remapped for the migration to WordPress 13 years ago, which was still being polled by something out there.
Another major concern of mine was photo handling. When I started, I just loaded images to an images folder and linked to them. Then I went through a variety of gallery programs that maintained photo libraries, each with a different presentation format. For a while, I even posted images by uploading them to a professional photography portfolio site and linking them in from there. All of those photos were still sitting wherever I loaded them, including on the photography hosting site. I wanted them all stored in a sensible way on my website to remove the third-party dependency. The first step was to inventory all the images used on my site, and Claude did that too.
The next step was building a staging site. Fortunately, all I had to do was add a DNS entry for the URL and Claude did all the heavy lifting of cloning the production site to staging. After that, it was a lot of long-running cleanup jobs — importing photos, moving uploaded files to canonical locations, and numerous verification passes.
The final step before going live was to post a test message. This is it. If you’re reading it, everything worked. There’s still a lot to do — get some good analytics going, maybe change the theme, a bunch of small tweaks — but now I’ve got something safe to build on.
By the way, I need to make sure comments still work, in case a few of you want to say “Hi!”
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