Digital Housekeeping: Data Sovereignty in a Era Run by the Cloud
Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Blog
A Long and Winding Road
I’ve been blogging since 1999, first via extremely cringe LiveJournal posts and later documenting my experiences from a Rotary exchange program to Japan in 2004 (including a nostalgic return last year). Over the years I’ve used various platforms, but none have felt quite right.
The Tumblr Era: A Love-Hate Relationship
For a long time, Tumblr was my go-to platform. It was easy to use and had a great community. However, as Tumblr evolved, it became clear that it wasn’t the ideal solution for my needs. The lack of HTML support and the platform’s overall instability made it difficult to maintain my blog.
I decided to take control of my content and migrate to a self-hosted solution. In recent years I’ve been pulling all my websites and toy projects out of AWS and GCP and throwing them on a server I keep in my house. It’s cheaper, but also feels better to maintain your own digital footprint in an era when the internet is overrun with your-content-on-other-people’s-computers.
After researching various options suggested by Markdown aficionado and “Inventor of AI” vsri.xyz, I settled on Hugo, a static site generator known for its speed and flexibility.
The Migration Process: A Two-Day Transformation
I used a combination of large language models, including Claude Code, Gemini, and Cursor, to automate the migration process. These tools helped me convert my old Tumblr posts with exasperating HTML into Markdown format and generate the necessary code for my new Hugo site.
For example this:
<figure data-orig-height="130" data-orig-width="130" data-orig-src="https://www.dropbox.com/s/t1o1a1mwydhsuas/sharing-caring.png?dl=1"><img src="../../media/68005301570_0.png" style="display:none;" data-orig-height="130" data-orig-width="130" data-orig-src="https://www.dropbox.com/s/t1o1a1mwydhsuas/sharing-caring.png?dl=1"/></figure>
Is now just this:
There were a ton of little tweaks and edge cases that frankly I would not have had the time to manage without the help of AI assistants. I was even able to generate a set of nginx rewrite rules that forward the old Tumblr URLs to the new Hugo pages.
A Nod to Iron Blogger SF
I want to give a shoutout to Iron Blogger SF, a community that has kept me motivated and accountable. Blog or it’s $5 in the pot, and then we donate the haul to charity at the end of the year.
With my new Hugo-powered blog and its fledgling theme, I’m excited to continue to explore the world of data sovereignty and share my experiences with you.