Since 2012, I’ve been held onto the contents of my site from 2004 until then in a folder on my computer. It was created in an archaic framework that didn’t have any support for transitioning to modern things… Until today… when I vibe coded my own tool.

Basically, I used a code editor to load up the entire file structure, prompted it with a paragraph of what I was looking for it to do.

This is an old website of mine that was using Cutenews. That software no longer works, but I’d like to parse the data here to create either a large PDF file or another easily consumed document type. My new website uses WordPress so if you can come up with a tool that could migrate the data, that would be great. I want to capture the stories, comments, and any media feasible.

After several hours of testing outputs, reverting changes, and one time nearly blowing up my entire site (serious pit-sweat moment), I had something that was good enough.

1090 new articles were added and I even had it parse their contents for various keywords in hopes that it could fit them into my existing categories. It did an alright job – most images did not convey, a lot of HTML is visible inline (I tried really hard to improve it here, but to no avail), the category recognition was pretty bad [just don’t rely on them for anything 13+ years ago], but the text is mostly here and when I archive this all into my memoir some day, the gist will exist.

When all was said and done, I told it to package up all the tools into a Github repository for others to use. It created a nice CLI and a useful README. Will it work for the one or two other folks out there who may be holding onto a garbage text file of memories from Cutenews? No idea; I can’t be bothered to test it, but the idea is there and they can surely plug it into an LLM themselves and get things working the way they want them to.

A few hours well-spent. And again, I didn’t touch the code at all – looked at the output, bashed my head against a few walls, and kept talking to the machine. The reason I put this off for 13 years? It would have taken me weeks to learn all the technologies involved and I would have given up far sooner than that.

And now I get to remove this damned task from my to-do list. YES!