SeanBoisen.com is Alive Again

After a multi-year hiatus, SeanBoisen.com is finally back up and running. I've rebuilt things using Pelican, with the hopes that i'll be able to do better both at posting legacy content (most of my earlier presentations are back; sermons, papers, etc. are yet to come) and restarting blogging without too much friction (beyond my own inertia).

I'm really not sure how long it might have taken without the help of Claude: issues included

• getting the domain registrar pointing at the correct hosting site's nameservers (and some fixing on the hosting side itself)
• setting up SSH keys, getting the right key in the right file, getting them authorized, then failing to write down the passphrase so having to go through all that again. That took at least a dozen rounds of interactions.
• Trying rsync, finding shell access wasn't configured, a long digression where we tried lftp only to find it didn't work and SSH kept falling back to password authentication. Then starting ssh-agent, checking the lftp build: this eventually resolved to a "failure ... in how lftp negotiates the SFTP protocol handshake on top of that already-successful SSH channel."
• At this point I took Claude's advice to go back to sftp, and then eventually rclone (so the same unchanged content isn't uploaded repeatedly), with a painfully long set of configuration questions.
• Numerous homebrew installations of programs I don't understand along the way. 🙃
• Further content questions on file naming, metadata, internal linking, and a tag-URL bug (TAG_URL/TAG_SAVE_AS mismatch).

All told this whole thread took more than 70 interactions: but Claude never lost the plot, and coached me through both tricky issues and my newbie questions. Maybe i would have been able to figure it all out eventually, but I can't imagine how long it would have taken. All this stuff is just paint-by-numbers for me: it's rare that i do this kind of system-level stuff.

The real proof will come down the road: can i remember the right incantations to upload new content, and will Pelican's static site approach protect me from the hackers I struggled with previously? But I'm thrilled to have things working again, and looking forward to getting some fresh content here.