For many years, I have despaired of ever saving the contents of my old blog (1999-2007), my writing for Linux Journal (1996-2019), and countless other articles, essays, and posts, published mostly on the Web—which looks and sounds like a permanent place (“sites,” “locations,” domains”), but in fact is a whiteboard.
Then, last week, I asked Claude for help. I pay Anthropic $20/month* for Claude’s services (Sonnet 5 at the moment), and it successfully rescued both my old blog and every item I ever submitted to Linux Journal. They are now at searls.com
Here are my Linux Journal submissions.
There is still some missing stuff in the Linux Journal corpus, and a lot of lint to pluck out as well. But the fact that this got done at all is, for me, a freaking miracle.
Yes, it took a lot of work, but I learned a lot of skills that I’m now leveraging on new projects that will make a future and not just re-make the past.
I also want to thank Dave Winer for providing a .zip of my old blog (and for both inspiring and hosting it in the first place), and Jake Savin for keeping a copy of the old blog running on an old server while I kept putting off my rescue efforts.
*I only started paying for Claude in July. I have been paying the same to OpenAI for ChatGPT’s services for a lot longer. While ChatGPT has been very helpful for many things, I’ve been told that Claude is better on projects like these two, so I gave it a whack. So far, so good.
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