Bootstrapped by AI

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I’ve been meaning to upgrade my personal website from Bootstrap 4 to Bootstrap 5, but I’ve not had the time. Recently, it occurred to me that this could be a fun way to test out AI coding. I installed Ampcode in my VS Code and asked it to help upgrade my Hugo static site to the newest Bootstrap.

It did a near perfect job. There were a few things I had to ask it to correct or address. I also had to provide a bit of knowledge on why some things it was trying didn’t work. But in general, I was able to get this done in minutes and for less than $1.

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HTTPS Only

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I have finally joined the twenty-first century and made this website HTTPS only. This is supposedly good for Google ranking and it is definitely good for privacy.

All non-HTTPS requests are now redirected to HTTPS. Further, I’ve implemented HSTS, disabled SSLv2 and SSLv3, and done all of the things necessary to get an A+ on SSL Labs.

Hooray for security! The next step will be supporting HTTP 2.0.

Website changes, again

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A few years have passed so it seemed like it was time for yet another website change. I’ve not changed much visually, but I’ve changed the entire static content generation stack.

Previously, my site was generated using a static content generator called Nanoc. It took a set of source files written in Markdown, HTML, Haml, Sass, and a bunch of other stuff and output them as HTML and CSS. I had a lot of complexity. So much so that I never touched the content and didn’t want to upgrade Nanoc. Plus, the way rules worked changed in Nanoc 3 and I didn’t want to face untangling my mess.

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A New ${HOME}

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Up until last week, this website was run on a generic shared hosting account. For the most part, this worked well. At times, it could be slow. I went through all kinds of trouble to tune WordPress as much as I could to make it respond faster. Unfortunately, a lot of the slowness was in the shared MySQL server that they provided. I had them move me between servers a few times, but it never fully resolved the issues.

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The Webs I’ve Spun

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For a long time now, I’ve been looking for a new content management system for my website. Over the years, I’ve tried all sorts of solutions and never found one that I found to be a satisfying solution. Finally, I think I may have found something I don’t absolutely hate.

In the beginning, there was Geocities. Back in those days, GeoCities websites were broken down into “cities” and addresses. For example, a URL may have looked something like http://www.geocities.com/broadway/1138. My first website was somewhere under /broadway/. I believe I used a GeoCities tool to generate the HTML. Later, for some reason I don’t remember, I relocated to /SiliconValley/. By that point, I had started tinkering with HTML and created my website with some shareware website authoring tool for Windows 3.1, though mainly writing my own HTML. This was back before CSS, kids.

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