In 2011, I made my first travel blogging website. I spent months working on it. I told myself that learning HTML and CSS (the core coding languages for a website) would be a smart thing to do. I guess it was; but by Jove it was frustrating. I spent hours trying to do simple stuff: like getting a button to appear in the right place. Travel blogging updates required a laptop, some (hacked) WiFi and a dollop of patience as the HTML site was re-edited. It wasn’t a great solution.
In 2016, I made a new travel blogging website. I was particularly pleased with the rather catchy and alliterative domain name I’d procured – alexaway.co.uk. Now a far wiser man and with the lessons of the past still ringing in the mind, this time, there was to be no code editing on the move. I told myself that learning AWS and self-hosting my WordPress site there would be a smart thing to do. It definitely was, but I’d still made it difficult for myself. It took weeks of googling to write up scripts to keep the site up to date, secure and backed up.
The year of 2026 started as a dire year for alexaway. It was already a bot-infested, out-of-date dinosaur, but just to add salt to the wounds, AWS sent me an email to let me know their server it was running on had died and that maybe I should take a look. Cheers boys.
In case you’re wondering, resurrecting a bot-infested dinosaur website that got shut off unexpectedly is not a time-efficient exercise, or at least, it never used to be. Today however…
In just one evening, my new best friend AI-Claude had flushed out the 400,000 bots, updated everything and got it all redeployed into a fresh AWS service. I didn’t even stop watching TV as it did it.
- Site in 2011 – total brain focus required
- Site in 2016 – high brain focus required
- Site in 2026 – basically no focus required
This used to be hard. It’s not anymore.
I wonder where the IT world will be for my next bit of site engineering work.
PS: Vietnamese travel blog posts incoming! 🇻🇳
🤖