Way back in 2007 I left my old blogging platform and migrated this website over to a custom blog platform that I had written in Django. At the time, I was learning Django, and this blog was my first real-world Django project.
As most know that I love Django and I have spent many many years of my life writing code that utilizes the framework. As I matured this blogging platform, I deployed it across many websites. My own, my company’s, clients, etc.
For the last several years though I’ve had to shift my focus to develop software using the Go language. This is for a few reasons but the biggest one was I just fell in love with the language and writing code in it. Fast build times, quick test runs, and single binary deployments also helped lure me over. Obviously, I still write Python/Django, but my focus has been elsewhere for some years.
Anyway, I found myself wanting to update this website and move away from bootstrap to use the chota mini css framework. It’s one of the few frameworks I sort of understand and can easily customize (yeah, I still suck at frontend).
I also have been getting more familiar with the hugo static site generator lately and have already built a blog using it for LinkTaco. So I figured it was a good solution to migrate the CSS framework in use but also the entire underlying platform. This saves me some deployment pain, one fewer service to monitor, one fewer database to manage and backup, etc.
Another new thing I’ve been toying with is AI coding tools. Especially Claude Code. I really resisted this for some time because of personal hang ups about using it. Also I didn’t think AI tools were that good (yet) for actual day-to-day software development. Well Claude Code changed all of that for me. I’ll write more about my newish workflows later but for this blog migration I decided to see if CC could do it for me.
Short answer? It could. Honestly it was relatively easy to get done. The frustrating part was creating and modifying the design. I spent most of my time prompting it to match the old design as closely as possible. I eventually ended up tweaking the things I wanted myself (which is typical of agentic coding).
In the end I’m happy with the results and the new site. Everything lives in a git repo. It’s an easier deployment and management situation as well. I’ll get around to creating a build script so that it auto deploys but for now a simple shell script builds and deploys it for me.
I can’t imagine this being much easier.