Approximately 71 years ago, I hand-coded my first portfolio site. Most of the writing from the first decade or so of my career lived there, reconstructed from black-and-white scans I’ve made from the original print issues and accompanied by tiny images because my Jaz drive was in the shop so 480px was the best I could do.

Since then, every year or two I’ve dutifully auto-paid GoDaddy for the domain and A Small Orange for the hosting. These weren’t payments I was happy about, necessarily, but it was the path of least resistance and the idea of migrating it somewhere else was not an exciting one.

This week, though, I got another one of those renewal reminder emails. And I thought: not today, [evil deity of your choosing]! If the past few months have taught me anything, it’s that Claude Code has made the phrase “too technical for me to try” virtually obsolete.

The first step was easy. I transferred the domain registration to WordPress.com ($13 for the first year, and an extra year tossed in for free).

On to the site itself. I tried creating a full site backup from A Small Orange, but it failed twice and a support ticket went answered. Instead, Claude Code pulled all the content down via FTP, and then proposed an architecture for a Jekyll static site that I could host on GitHub for free. (That ended up getting a little wonky; GitHub got stuck on SSL provisioning, so we moved the actual hosting to Cloudflare Pages.)

Now I’ve got a local backup of the full site, which includes an old and doubtless embarrassing WordPress blog, a microsite I hand-built for my wedding, and a ton of old vacation photos. The portfolio site—lovely minimal design courtesy of CC—lives on GitHub, and I make edits locally and sync changes through VS Code. Each commit means Cloudflare redeploys the entire site from scratch, but it takes just a couple of minutes. I can’t believe I typed any of the words in this paragraph.

Next up: finally switching this blog over to the digital garden theme I built watched Claude build. And a dozen or so other side projects that are suddenly something I can see through rather than just saying “it’d be cool if that existed.”