New Old Blog
I wrote some blog software a long long time ago. All in perl, which is the language I used for everything at the time. I did it mostly because I could, and blogging was "cool" then. Through some iteration of the code I added Leanne as an author, and September 12th, 2006, that version of the blog went live.
I ran that for years, but sometime around when we moved from Ajax to Pickering, I stopped hosting it on the internet. I barely blogged and during some computer upgrade, it just didn't seem important enough to update. Always at the bottom of my todo list.
The problem was, everything was out dated. The blog was in perl, which almost no one uses anymore, on apache as the web server, which is mostly unnecessary for this kind of web app, and backed by mysql for the database, which is way overkill for a few bits of text. It really needed to be modernized, because patching and dragging it along was way too much work. But re-writing it all was also too much work.
Fast forward a few years, and along comes Cursor (https://cursor.com/). Cursor is an application that helps you write code. You describe the application you want, and then it uses backend API calls to AI models like Claude Opus, OpenAI Codex, or their own coding model, to generate your code. As a kind of test I said, here is my old website, I want you to rewrite this whole thing in a modern language. I even want you to copy over the old posts and comments. But I need updated everything, including proper Google authentication, rather than my fairly insecure home grown version.
And it did. Here it is. Written in Go, a language I don’t understand, which has its own built in web serving ability, and backed by sqlite, a database I can never remember the commands for, but is much better suited to this task. I asked for the app. The AI wrote the app.
So I’m back online. And the whole archive of blogs is back online. You can read about a random Saturday from 2005 (https://ajax.verkley.com/story/4) or what I thought about the iPhone when it came out (https://ajax.verkley.com/story/143) or even way back when I thought mobile computing would be a thing. (https://ajax.verkley.com/story/22). ChatGPT tells me that if you bought $1000 worth of Apple shares back when I wrote that, they’d be worth about $175,000 now. So, I bet you don’t want to miss a post now, do you! (sadly, I also did not buy Apple shares then.)
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