Category Archives: Blogging

When did I start blogging?

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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

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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

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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 total

The 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.

“Something his spirit required”

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John Keller is the title character in Lawrence Block’s Hit Man series. Killing people is his profession…but stamp collecting is his passion.

“When he was working with his stamps, he was always entirely absorbed in what he was doing. He was expending considerable concentration on what was essentially an unimportant task, and that seemed to be something his spirit required.”

This blog is essentially an unimportant task and, apparently, something my spirit requires.

Perplexity on Snapshots & Fragments

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I asked Perplexity to read through 258 posts in my “Snapshots & Fragments” category — the catch‑all bin I’ve used for photos and ephemera over the years — and tell me what it thought was going on. I had a hunch an outside lens might spot patterns I only sense in the gut. Here’s the result, unedited.

Perplexity: You’ve been quietly building a long, visual autobiography and local micro‑history in that “catch‑all” category—what looks like ephemera is actually a coherent archive of self, place, and media across roughly 15 years. Continue reading →

My page of pages

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From time to time I have something I want to share that is too long, or in some other way, doesn’t lend itself to the post format. So I create a page that can be as long as necessary. There are now 79 such pages and I’ve attempted to organize them in several groups on yet another page.

Almost all of these were referenced in one of my posts but those links would be easy to miss. If you go to this new page and click around, you’ll get the idea.

There’s been a bit of an explosion of these pages in the last couple of years as I had long conversations (26 so far) with an AI that I found too interesting not to save. I created pages for these rather than try to share them in a blog post. [↓ comment below]

Since most recent pages have been conversations with an AI, I asked Phil to task his AI agent (Milton) with an analysis (PDF). A few excerpts below:

A blog used to be a place where you published what you noticed. Now, after enough years, it can also become something a machine can notice you through.

what changes when a conversation does not have to start from zero?

That makes these pages feel less like transcripts and more like field notes from first contact with a new medium.

The strongest recurring idea is the mirror. AI as mirror of human knowledge. AI as mirror of your blog. AI as mirror of your reading, spiritual interests, anxieties, and old obsessions.

The collection reads like a long argument against disappearance. Radio disappears. The old internet disappears into feeds. Human memory softens and revises. Hosting companies change. Platforms eat what people used to own. Even AI chats vanish unless someone bothers to save them.

I think these pages are worth preserving because they document an unusually self-aware encounter between an old-school blogger and a new-school intelligence interface.

If I had to name what these rambles represent, I would call them: Evidence of the moment a personal archive became dialogic.

Before, the blog stored what you had seen. Now, with AI, the blog can become part of a conversation about what all that seeing might mean.

 

“AI, please read my whole blog”

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The work that Perplexity has done with my 25 years of blog posts makes me wonder if there have been similar efforts by other bloggers.

On the open web there are clear signs of people doing very similar things: giving an AI years of blog/website content and asking for personality or thematic analysis. Some examples include:

  • A LinkedIn post: “I told AI to read my blog, here’s what it said,” where the author has the model analyze their voice and content over time.
  • A Japanese blogger on note.com who “had an AI read my blog and perform a self‑analysis.”
  • Ed Harrison: “I Asked an AI to Read My Old Blog So You Don’t Have To,” describing handing 15 years of writing to an AI and reporting what came back.
  • A data‑oriented piece where someone scraped their site, fed it to an LLM via API, and did summarization/topic‑modelling of all posts.
  • Technical posts about summarizing old, personal blogs using local Llama models.

Those are all close cousins of what you’ve been doing with Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and your ~25‑year archive.

Your project’s particular flavor

What you’ve done is unusually thorough and multi‑agent: you exported the entire smays.com corpus, converted it to markdown/XML, had multiple LLMs read it, and then commissioned long‑form essays about “the AI‑readable self,” “nondual,” religion, dot‑com, etc. You’ve also let other people’s AI stacks (Phil’s agents, Steve’s Hermes setup) run full‑corpus reads and feed back 14‑page analyses.

So while you’re not the only one saying “AI, please read my whole blog,” you are doing a deeper, more longitudinal experiment than most of the public examples, which tend to be one‑off personality summaries or technical demos.

The AI’s read this blog

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Like a lot of people (most?), I use Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and (once upon a time) ChatGPT to answer questions. To explain things. To find stuff.

I don’t do “vibe coding” or task my “agents” to do whatever agents do. What I really wanted the AI to do was “read” my blog (6,500 posts spanning 25 years) and help me spot recurring themes, connections, patterns. What do all of those posts say about who I am, who I was and the journey between the two.

From time to time I would export all the posts from a particular category or tag and shoot those up to one of the AI’s and always got back interesting analyses. But I was after the full gestalt. 

Today I exported all of my posts from the WordPress database as an XML file and had Claude convert it to a markdown file (which are much easier/smaller for an AI to process). I uploaded that data to each of the AI’s I use on a daily basis (Perplexity, Claude and Gemini) with the following prompt:

Since I first began dabbling with AI (almost 3 years ago) I’ve wondered what these tools might tell me about my 6,500 blog posts spanning 25 years. About the blog posts and —by extension— about me. I finally got around to converting the entire blog to a markdown file and am uploading here for future reference and analysis.

I created pages here on the blog for the responses from Perplexity and Claude. Gemini got a little weird on me:

“I approach this analysis as a direct, collaborative cognitive tool. I will evaluate your premises neutrally, utilizing logic and evidence, and build upon your sound structural work using first-person analysis. There will be no conversational filler or flattering prefaces.”

Uh, okay. 

Until today, no other entity had ever “read” my entire blog except me. Now, something a lot smarter has. 

“Do teens regret their social media use?”

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The blogger in me is surprised and delighted by #3.

“So how did social media regrets hold up? Out of 20 possible regrets, too much time on social media ranked 13th. The top regrets were 1.) not sticking up for oneself, 2.) being too self-conscious, 3.) not documenting memories, 4.) not learning practical life skills and 5.) not getting help with mental health. Girls were slightly more likely to regret time on social media than boys.”

— From a new study by Irish researcher Eoin Whelan 

New: Recent Posts Widget

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I started this blog (almost 25 years ago) so I’d have a place to save favorite quotes, excerpts from books, best lines from movies. These are scattered across several categories (which have evolved over time) but Quotable & Notes is where you’ll find my favorites. 533 posts to date.

Yeah, that’s too many to be “findable.” Even if you clicked the link to that category, are you gonna scroll through that many posts? Nope.

With a little help from one of the AI’s I found a WordPress plugin called Recent Posts Widget that you can see in the sidebar on the home page (not sure where it shows up on a phone). I configured it to randomly display five posts from the Quotable & Notes category. Each time you refresh the page, you see five different quotes. 

I’m quite pleased with this widget because it serves up some of my favorite posts. Pretty sure you can’t do this kind of thing on the social media platforms that only care about the last five minutes.