Reviving My Creative Archive

Over the past few days, I’ve been working on bringing back content from my old website that I thought was lost to the digital ether. This wasn’t just a simple copy-paste operation - it involved migrating poetry, stories, and blog posts from my original site that I took offline back in 2013 because I was embarrassed by how “web 1.x” it looked.

The Migration Process

The process took about a day, squeezed in between other tasks, but it was made possible through the collaboration of several AI tools. I used KiloCode extensively to create scripts for converting various poems and stories by myself and my wife Pat to markdown format suitable for Hugo. These scripts also handled extracting dates and times from the original content.

In retrospect, I would have paid more attention to the extraction process. I spent a lot of time afterward working out how to best compare each generated file to the original and tune the formatting to work better with the LLM’s assistance.

AI Tools and Challenges

The migration involved using KiloCode, Grok Code Fast 1, and Claude Sonnet 4. While these tools were incredibly helpful, I did encounter the common issue of edit loops with Grok, which required some manual intervention to break out of repetitive cycles.

Enhanced Creative Section

The Creative pages now feature:

  • Dedicated search functionality within the creative section, separate from the rest of the site but still integrated into the overall site search
  • Random search feature - a nice callback to functionality I had on the original site
  • Light mode support that now works properly across the site

Original Site Nostalgia

For context, here’s a link to my original site as it appeared shortly before I removed the blog in 2010, thinking I would replace it with WordPress (which never happened): https://web.archive.org/web/20100429094101/http://www.simonhuggins.com/

I took the site completely offline in 2013, mostly due to embarrassment about its dated appearance, but also because that was around about the time I joined SAP, and I didn’t want that to be anyone’s first impression! By this time, LinkedIn was a much more common place for people to go to see what you do professionally. So in a sense, this whole web site thing is a bit of a throwback. But one where I get to own and curate my own ‘real estate’. Which seems a lot more possible with the help of today’s code tools like kilocode.

Future Plans

I’m planning to add more recent poetry - the current collection goes up to around 2010 - and stories, particularly from when I had a creative splurge on Quora. There’s a wealth of material there that deserves to be properly formatted and presented.

Nostalgic Blog Posts

As a bit of nostalgia, I’ve also resurrected a few blog posts from the original site. These give a glimpse into my life and thoughts from 2009:

These posts cover everything from philosophical musings on computer modeling to leaving my job at Apple, theater reviews, and movie critiques. They’re a fascinating time capsule of my interests and experiences from that period.

Technical Implementation

The conversion process involved creating Python scripts that could parse the original HTML content and transform it into clean markdown. This included:

  • Extracting poem and story content while preserving formatting
  • Converting dates to proper ISO format for Hugo
  • Maintaining metadata like titles and categories
  • Ensuring proper front matter for each piece

The search functionality was implemented using Fuse.js, providing fast, client-side searching within the creative section while maintaining the ability to find creative content through the main site search.

Reflections

This migration project has been both technically challenging (for which I offloaded a lot of the heavy lifting to AI models) and emotionally rewarding. It’s reminded me of the value of preserving creative work, even if it’s not perfect. The AI tools made the heavy lifting possible, but the real satisfaction comes from seeing this content live again in a modern, accessible format.

The light mode implementation ensures that readers can enjoy the content in their preferred visual environment, and the enhanced search makes it easy to discover specific pieces within the growing creative archive.

I’m excited about continuing to expand this section with newer work and look forward to sharing more of my writing journey with visitors to the site.

Likely next steps:

  • Pagination on search results
  • Include blog posts on the home page (it seems to be ignoring these right now for some reason)
  • Include more recent poetry and short stories
  • Include old Quora content (probably via my open source Quora extraction project) - I might just dump this en-masse to start with
  • Include music (most likely with a player lifted from the advent calendar)
  • Start creating audio versions of articles / poetry etc - possible make them into ‘podcasts’ and maybe even YouTube videos over time.
  • Link Stream personal management system so that items from boards that relate to this site can be added automatically to a ‘Coming Soon’ page - I will probably add a tag so only items that should be made public are included
  • Link Stream personal management system so that changes checked into specific repositories can be automatically added as a blog post to identify changes. Ideally this would be added to related sites as well as simonhuggins.com
  • Auto-publish new articles onto LinkedIn and Facebook when tagged to do so
  • I should plan some articles about the ecosystem I’ve built up for myself as well - someone would probably find it interesting! E.g. how I manage projects and web sites, the behomoth Stream platform that only I use right now and some interesting side projects that come off this (and how they have helped me), my use of kilocode (should probably include an article on how to use Memory Bank), how my perspective has changed over the years, how some of the projects I wanted to create years ago have become large platforms today - if only! And the ideas that might fit into the evolving landscape that haven’t yet become a ’thing’. I should probably focus on those tbh!

All good fun, and a good way to track and record my explorations.