I created the latest iteration of this website during the first week of 2024, as I'd taken it off for my birthday to extend the Christmas/New years break.

During most of the year I just don't have the headspace and time to really dedicate to getting into the right mindset for working on my website. My head is full of work and life chores, which just doesn't leave much room for something like this.

As I'm typing this it's my Summer 2024 holiday and I've gone away to a beautiful forest based resort. Far away from responsibility and the noise and chaos of everyday life. 

All of this has meant I've been able to finally upgrade this website from it's most basic MVP implementation and add in a few things I've wanted to do for ages, such as

• List articles by tag (You could click on them before, but you'd just get a 404)
• List articles by year
• Breadcrumb
• Listing articles by published / original creation date

That last point is the big one, as I wanted to be able to import all of my old Tumblr based articles without them appearing as new content on the website.

To do this effectively took a bit of fiddling, but now it's thankfully in place and working correctly.

However this also meant I needed to work out the best way to import my old Tumblr articles.

I've been a professional developer* for 25 years, but I must admit at times I can find certain challenges a bit tedious. When I first started I would happily loose myself for hours working through a problem, whereas these days I often just want the results without having to slog through it all.

So I decided to try my luck with some ChatGPT based assistance. Rather than doing a load of research and then hacking about with code, could I create an export and import system this way?

(* I get paid for it, I don't claim to be any good)

In short the answer was yes, after a few iterations I was able to produce a Python script to export all of my Tumblr articles and media to my machine.

Certainly much faster than if I'd done it the traditional way, not bad

However once I had all the content as JSON and media files on my machine, what would be my options to import it?

At this point I decided to take a slightly different route and do it mostly manually. I called upon the help of ChatGPT one last time to create a CSV file that I could import into Google Sheets that would give me the content I needed to work with.

There were a few reasons for this, some technical, but also I found it interesting to manually go through pieces of my old content and get to look at it whilst I was adding it into my new CMS.

It felt a little like looking through an old photo album, getting to enjoy the old memories. 

So whilst I've got a few days away from the the usual routines, I'll continue to add in this legacy content. Because that's what I'd like to do