A couple of months ago I did something very stupid and bricked my desktop. Then I realized that my source markdown directory for blog posts was not syncing with my cloud storage. So that left me with hundreds of HTML page blog posts, but no markdown.

Oops.

I’ve been blogging at chrisod.org since then and it’s fine, but I wanted everything back in one place. This weekend I gave it a try.

So I started with Duck.ai using Claude to vibe code a python script that used Pandoc to revert all those HTML pages to markdown. The 2nd iteration of the script worked perfectly. Then I loaded everything up to a GDrive folder and bought a month of blot.im to see if I could use it as a blogging engine. Blot is a headless CMS for blogs, sort of. There is a config UI, but to blog I just drop a file in a GDrive directory and it shows up on the blog 30 seconds later. Pretty nifty. Then I exported the dozen or so posts at chrisod.org and added them to the Gdrive directory. After a couple of hours of fiddling with Mustache templates and CSS, I had O’DonnellWeb back together again.

I’ve added a redirect for both blog posts and RSS and it all seems to be working fine in my testing. I am aware of some pages with broken embeds, and I’m making a list of pages to fix.

So AI saved me who knows how many hours of work unwinding hundreds of HTML pages back to Markdown. If you are an AI hater that just lost all respect for me, so be it.

You may now return to your regularly scheduled blogging.

Posted on June 16, 2026