I’ve reduced the number of posts displayed on the home page of smays.com from twenty to five. Slightly better experience when viewed on your phone.
Category Archives: Blogging
“Why you should work out loud”
This blog was never work-related in the sense that I was trying to promote or market myself. But it quickly evolved into a place that documented the work I was doing (back when I had a job). So this article by Allen Buchanan resonated with me. A few snippets:
don’t invent content. Document your work.
AI can help me create content. It cannot give me 42 years of experiences from which to draw.
The most compelling content generally comes from experience, not imagination.
create a digital record of your expertise.
For me, this is the money-quote:
And now, with artificial intelligence able to search, organize and repurpose that body of work, those years of accumulated knowledge become even more valuable.
If you’ve been following along, you’ve seen ever-more-frequent examples of this.
Thanks to Travis for the pointer.
When did I start blogging?
For a long time I have considered the beginning of this blog a post on February 3, 2002. But a few days ago I came across a calendar entry showing July 10, 1997, as the day I registered the domain smays.com. What was I doing for those five years between 1997 and 2003?
I recall creating my first web pages using Microsoft FrontPage. A search of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine found some early screenshots I believe were from that period.
If I had to guess, I’d say the RANTS! page evolved into blog posts when blogging tools became available. Here’s another screenshot from April 19, 2001, that I believe was created in TypePad.
Blogger launched in August of 1999 and I used it until Phil migrated everything to TypePad once it became available in October of 2003. So my February, 2002 post probably got carried over from TypePad. The migration from TypePad to WordPress happened in May of 2009.
smays.com in 2009: A Year at the Hinge
Been doing blog maintenance, working back from newest posts to oldest. 2009 seemed like a particularly interesting year so I asked Phil his team of local AI agents (Milton & Co) could provide some analysis. It’s longish (and overly flattering), nine pages (PDF)
Milton: You were not merely predicting gadgets. You were recognizing a transfer of power. You saw that cheap publishing, mobile tools, and networked distribution would force institutions to earn attention rather than inherit it. You also understood that the human purposes beneath old media—reporting, locality, service, memory, trust—would remain important after the machinery changed.
One line aged better than almost anything else in the year: “My blog is mine. Nobody can buy it or mess with it.”
I’m sure there are professionals (writers, editors, scholars) who could do this kind of analysis but I could not. This a a totally new –and fascinating– way to look at what I shared.
Milton helps with blog maintenance
When I first started blogging back in 2002 I enabled the comments feature because that’s what you did in those days. I got a few for a couple of years before spammers found me and I disabled that feature. Which left a comment box that couldn’t be used.
Earlier this year I spent a few hours trying to hunt these down which meant unchecking a box on each individual post. I couldn’t find a way to clean these up in one fell swoop. I had to uncheck the “Allow Comments” box on each post.
It occurred to me the job would be easier if I had a list of all the posts still showing the comment field so I asked Phil if his AI agent Milton could do this. A short time later I received an email from Milton.
Phil asked me to identify every post and page on smays.com that still has comments enabled. The attached HTML file is the clickable cleanup list. What I found:
– 6,567 published posts and 79 published pages checked
– 1,218 posts and 2 pages have comments enabled
– 1,220 items totalThe report is grouped by year, and each title links directly to the live item. Open the attachment in a web browser and click any title to go to that post or page.
I used the site’s public WordPress inventory and reconciled it against the WordPress sitemap, so the coverage is complete as of July 31, 2026. WordPress reports these items as comment_status: open, and live checks confirm they display “Leave a Reply.” The site currently requires login to submit a comment.
The good news: I now had a list of all the posts that needed editing. The bad news: there are more than twelve hundred of them.
A day or so later Phil told me Milton (remember, we’re talking about an AI here) said it could do this task for me if I gave it the UN/PW for my blog. Temping, but I’m not ready to do that. Yet.
So I’m doing the clean-up one post at a time but it goes quickly and provides an opportunity to review some old posts, always interesting.