New Coach. New Site. Same Homer.

Disclaimer: this first little bit is going to be about nerdy website stuff. Skip down a few paragraphs if you just want to read about the future of War Blogle.

I already tweeted about this, but now let me give you all of the details. You probably didn’t know (or care), but this hallowed space was hacked in April of this year. It was bad. It corrupted all the website files, thousands of images and videos, and dozens of podcasts. It wasn’t just me. It wasn’t dumb ol’ Blogle. It happened to sites all over the world. You can read about the stupid ransomware attack here if you’re a nerd.

For months I commenced to bothering my website hosting provider, who locked the server down because of the hacking. This made it impossible to get in there and see if I could salvage anything. After multiple phone calls begging, using the phrase “20 years’ worth of work” over and over, I was able to at least get to the files. I could see everything I had uploaded since 2007, but the files were done. They wouldn’t open or anything. What about the first Lutzie video? What about Deshaun Watson? What about Baby Blogle’s “We KILLED” videos? Yep, all gone.

Then I saw a commercial about Claude, the AI tool. We’ll call him clAUde from now on. I know AI is going to bring about the downfall of man, but quite simply, clAUde brought about the resurgence of Blogle.

I’ve messed with ChatGPT and learned that it can do some pretty amazing stuff. But I opened clAUde and I asked it to do things that a human would say is impossible. I went to Auburn for computer science, and I wasn’t that good at it, but I understood it enough. The things that I told clAUde to do — and it did — are like meeting an alien that knows everything about everything and can pull magic out of a tiger’s… whatever.

In the meantime, I luckily figured out that my database was still there and it wasn’t corrupted. This meant I had all of the words I’ve ever typed into War Blogle, over 4,500 posts since 2007. This was huge. And thanks to a good friend, Tony O., I was able to get that back into a new site. But any design aspect, or any media file of any kind, was just gone.

Then I remembered the Wayback Machine. If you have ever built or managed a website, you know about the Wayback Machine. Whether you like it or not, web.archive.org is taking snapshots of every website out there. It will show you what a website looked like on a certain day in history. It’s not perfect. Certain design things don’t work, and sometimes images are just missing, but it’s helpful if you ever want to remember something about a website.

I told clAUde to go to the Wayback Machine, scour my entire old website, downloaded all the images it could find, put them in the file structure that WordPress (the platform this site is built on) uses, and let me download it to upload into the new site. For about 85% of the images, it worked. This might sound simple, but it’s magic. I had a zip file I could just upload into the new site and most of the images were back.

It’s not perfect. You will see blogles that are missing images or just look weird. It’s a work in progress, and I’ll fix those as I find them. If you find them, send me a message.

Then I asked clAUde to go find podcast files and any videos, and it somehow downloaded nearly all of those from random places on the internet. It couldn’t find one podcast file, but then it reminded me that I have the podcasts on YouTube, so it downloaded the audio from one of those. Through telling an alien computer machine in plain words what I wanted it to do. We’re cooked.

Since my OCD level is astronomical, I asked ChatGPT to help me design a new layout for the site. I wanted all the old stuff to still be there, but I also wanted the site to feel new and not like a blog from 2007 that had just been patched back together. Somewhere in the process of figuring out what should go where, what should be featured, and what people actually want to look at these days, I realized that this race of alien computers basically knew everything about War Blogle, my personality, how I think, and many other things that can’t be repeated.

And that’s when the redesign turned into a new direction for all things War Blogle.

It basically said quit blogging so much, quit trying to be a beat reporter, and just let your personality and opinions be the focus. So the new layout started taking shape around that — less “here’s everything that happened today” and more podcasts, videos, opinions, old Blogle stuff, and whatever else I feel like doing.

Aside from the previous coach, which can be blamed on me, I guess, I have done a complete website design rebuild any time Auburn hired a new football coach, so in a sense this was coming anyway with the hiring of Alex Golesh. I was just forced to do it by some really cool guy that corrupted all of my files. Probably a Bammer. But really, in a weird way, I’m glad it happened. I just didn’t think I’d have to include aliens in digging up 20-year-old files.

So… the future of Blogle will hopefully be a little more appealing to our microwave society. I’m still going to predict games, post videos, write a little bit, and get others to write as well. But my focus will be more on podcasts, quick videos of some kind, and just fun multimedia.

That said, both clAUde and ChatGPT wanted part of the new website to have a focus on the past. So all three of us built a Blogle Vault at the bottom of the homepage. You can search by year. You can click to see a random blogle. You can see a blogle from this day in previous years. And I have a section for Blogle’s Greatest Hits that will show you the top 30 blogles by view count all-time.

I have a ton of ideas, but I wanted to get a base version (War Blogle v6.0) of this site up before the season starts this Saturday. I am going to use AI to write a better War Blogle App than I had before. I’m leaning into all of it. Use the tools you have. And yes, my college degree is still being used. I had to know how and what to say to clAUde to get these things done. So humanity is saved for now.

If you want to help with writing, podcasting, videos, or gameday stuff in any way, message me.