Why I rebuilt my blog and deleted all my old posts
All the old posts are gone. The site isn't broken; I deleted them myself. Here's why I started over, and what Lunar Dispatches will cover next.
If you've visited terryl.in before, you've probably noticed that all the old posts are gone. Don't worry, the site isn't broken. I deleted them myself.
I thought about it for a long time and finally decided to start from scratch. This post is about why.
Those posts were just too old
I've been teaching myself to code since 2007. Most of what piled up here were technical notes on PHP, JavaScript and WordPress, plus write-ups for some of my open-source projects.
When I wrote them, they were approaches I genuinely found useful. But years went by. The languages got upgraded, and the frameworks and plugins changed several times over. Looking back now, a lot of the examples don't run anymore, and some of them have better solutions today.
The worst thing that can happen to a write-up like that is going out of date. If a reader follows along and it fails, they'd have been better off never finding it. Fixing every post one by one was never going to happen, honestly, so I took them all down.
The way I build software is completely different now
My way of working has changed a lot over the past year or two. Everything is AI-driven now. From requirements and design to the code itself, I do it all together with AI, and most of the time I only review the process and check whether the result meets the requirements.
I used to spend paragraphs explaining how to build a feature step by step. What I'd rather share now is how to break a problem down clearly, how to talk to the AI, how to confirm that what it built actually works, and when I still have to make the call myself.
The old posts were the old me. When you come here now, I want you to see how I work today.
If I'm starting over, I'm replacing everything
Since all the content had to be rewritten anyway, I replaced the whole system too.
- The lunar studio: The home page is now a 3D studio on the Moon. You can walk a character around the space station, and every room has a mini-game to play. The whole site was built the AI-driven way as well.
- Lunar Dispatches: The blog has a new name and a new system, and now runs on Cloudflare. AI agents check whether things meet the bar. I don't write the posts or make the images myself; I look at the results and polish them.
- 11 languages: Both the site and the blog can switch between all the major languages.
The old system had been running for years, and things kept piling up. Starting fresh was much cleaner than patching it.
If you came here from an old link
If you clicked an old link and ended up here, sorry you came away empty-handed. Whatever that post said probably doesn't apply much anymore. If you're really stuck on something, just come and talk to me.
What I'll write about next
Lunar Dispatches is my development notebook from the lunar studio. Here's roughly what you'll find:
- What it's like to build real projects together with AI, including what went right and where I tripped up
- How interactive pieces like the lunar studio get made
- Problems I run into on client projects, and how I ended up solving them
If you have a project or an idea you've wanted to build but never managed to, feel free to find me on LinkedIn.
Thanks for reading those old posts back then. This time, let's start over from this one.
— Terry L