A New Engine for Casabona.org

I got a harebrained idea after talking to my friend James Laws, who recently changed his entire website.

The idea is simple: I just want a nice place to write. With my WordPress site, I write in Obsidian, push it to WordPress, and then end up fighting the editor to make sure everything looks OK. When I want to make even simple changes, they feel hard.

I was a WordPress developer for years, and even small changes seemed arduous because of the technical debt I've accumulated¹.

I just want a nice place to write. So I decided to convert casabona.org to flat markdown files.

A Man with a Plan

The first thing I needed to do was come up with a plan. The site is 20+ years old and there are many links, images, and redirects to consider. I suspect things will break, but I really want to limit the breaking.

So my plan, with the goal being all of my essays/thought pieces living at casabona.org, was this:

1. Build the casabona.org flat files site, and make sure the URLs/permalinks exactly match the format from the casabona.org WordPress site.
2. Move any essays from the WordPress site to the flat files site.
3. Move essays on streamlinedsolopreneur.com to casabona.org and set up redirects.
4. Move a select number of pages (/now, /uses, /about) to the flat files site.
5. Move all important WordPress pages and forms to streamlinedsolopreneur.com.
6. Create a fully static version of the casabona.org WordPress site to live at archive.casabona.org.
7. Create a redirect engine for all old casabona.org pages, assets, and redirects.

Just writing that out sounds daunting. I love a good web development project, but since I'm no longer in web development, this was neither worth my time, nor worth hiring out.

The WordPress site was largely fine (random editing issues / tech debt aside). I just wanted a change. And I could make that change, thanks to Claude Code.

How I Used AI in This Site Migration

First, I did an analysis of my site traffic, using Claude's built-in browser and looking at both Ahrefs and Google Search Console / Google Analytics.

The AI surfaced a lot of good information, including old domains I didn't renew that now redirect to...undesirable... sites. So I reviewed everything there and came up with a general redirection plan.

Then I reviewed a list of all the essays on streamlinedsolopreneur.com myself, and created a list (or really, a date range) of what I wanted to move over.

Honestly, from there, I took those assets and handed them to Claude Code. It used a pre-existing open-source engine to do the markdown conversion, scraped the articles from the WordPress sites, and created a local site for me to test.

Then it created the static site from the current WordPress site (which would have taken days using leading WordPress plugins), and after testing locally, deployed both the main site and the archive to Netlify.

I also added search thanks to a library called Pagefind, which is super neat!

After reviewing the redirect plan one more time, and testing everything in the staging environment, I pointed the domains over to Netlify from my WordPress host, Pressable.

I uploaded the page and form exports from casabona.org to Claude, which pared them down to just what was needed. It also generated the redirect file for streamlinedsolopreneur.com.

Once I was satisfied with my test, and the AI's automated testing, I disabled the casabona.org WordPress site to make sure nothing new relied on it².

After a couple of days with no errors, I determined that I could delete the Pressable site.

This is the first article published with my new method.

How I Publish Articles Now

I've written exclusively in Obsidian for about a year now³. I want to keep doing that without wiring up GitHub into a folder in the vault.

So I also had Claude Code create a simple Obsidian plugin that allows me to write as I normally do, then push the markdown file (with the appropriate front matter for the markdown-to-html conversion engine) to GitHub.

I have Netlify automatically deploy from GitHub, so when I push the file, it gets published. No fighting the editor.

What's Left

The last couple of things I know I need to do:

1. Fully test the forms and pages that moved over to streamlinedsolopreneur.com.
2. Test publishing articles with and without images.
3. Update a page (like /now).

I'm also thinking about what credit usage on Netlify looks like. I've upgraded to the $9/mo plan for 1,000 credits and that should be more than sufficient. I was able to reduce my Pressable bill by 60%, saving over $400. But if updates and deploys are resource-intensive, I'll need to figure something out.

I really like the flat file model though.

I suspect there's still a bunch of testing I need to do, and probably some edge cases I haven't thought of.

What's Next

Something I did for the WordPress casabona.org was make a "feed" of my published work from around the web. This also allowed me to share links and photos, since I'm not on most social media anymore.

So aside from testing, I have another project in the back of my mind for my feed. It would live at feed.casabona.org and be an RSS aggregator, as well as allow me to post, Twitter-style. Maybe even add the Fediverse⁴.

It feels weird not having a WordPress-powered site after all these years. But it was a complicated and largely unnecessary system for what casabona.org is...which is now finally just a nice place to write.