As anyone who follows me closely knows, (meaning I am the only one who knows) I have 3 domains and 2 blogs. That isn’t to say that I am a prolific web personality with lots of interesting content and large audiences for my blogs. Rather is is to say, domains used to be cheaper, and I didn’t always have kids.
I recently used Claude Code at work to do some clean up on a bunch of PowerShell scripts that I use to manage one of the many SAAS services we use. I decided to try sometime a bit more ambitious at home. I have tinkered with and worked with the various AI tools here and there, but I wanted something I could get a deeper experience from. We are being asked, at work, to use AI tools more. The company does this for many reasons. For me, and the way I learn, it means I need to work on something practical, that doesn’t affect my work responsibilities.
So, here is what I am doing…
- I used Claude Code to improve some automation that I had that renews the Let’s Encrypt certs that I use on my sites. That was pretty easy and straight forward. I already had scripts that did the hard part (getting the certs), I just needed to automate deployment and scheduling. If It works like I expect, the certs should update themselves when we are 5 days out from my current certs expiring. This is really cool, because sometimes, I forget.
- I have had at least one of the 3 domains (this one) for more than 20 years. I am always paranoid that I am going to miss the renewal notice at some point and lose the domain. Now I have a regular check, that will start emailing me at intervals leading up the the renewal.
- I haven’t done a good job of keeping the underlying software up to date. You may have noticed, I don’t post often. When I do, it is in spurts and I almost always accompanied by some work getting the environment up to date. This can be tedious, even though I do like that part of things. Now I have a portal that tells me what versions I am on, and what versions are current (in theory). Some of the updating happens automatically, but major version changes require intervention.
- Sometime in the dark ages (2012 if I am not mistaken), I started using Windows Live Writer. They killed that off, but then brought it back as an open source project called Open Live Writer. One of the things that I really liked about Windows Live Writer was that you could pull your blog theme and it would allow you to edit with the same look and feel of the site. You could see how the post was going to look, as you wrote it. You didn’t have to wait until you published to see it. For this blog, that was helpful as I used to post a lot of screen shots, and I wanted to make sure you could actually see them in the context in which they were referenced. At some point, this stopped working. I only recently figured out that it stopped working because it was using IE under the covers to do the render. That doesn’t work too well these days. You can still get the background colors, but the theme just doesn’t show up. I am toying with the idea of revamping the open source code using Claude to help.
So, that OLW conversation has a lot going on. First, it was semi abandoned for a while. No updates, no new features. No one doing much with it. Now, there is someone that appears to be doing some updating of the app, but it is hard to tell if this is a commitment or an attempt at something that may or may not bear fruit. I am hopeful, but not terribly optimistic at this point. Mostly because I am pretty sure that Doug has a day job that is NOT giving OLW an overhaul.
I am going to see if I can tinker my way through some of the things that he has put together and maybe come up with a version that works for me and gets me what I want from the program. Wish me luck!
I will try to share more about my adventures in the near future.