The Thinkyhead Site — Reborn
After several days working with Hermes Agent, and building upon years of methodical procrastination, I’m thrilled to announce that the new thinkyhead.com is live. It’s good to be back with a modern, fast, extensible platform that can serve as the hub for all my projects going forward.
This was definitely a long-overdue migration. The previous site was older than dirt and I couldn’t even make updates to the site without completely breaking the menus. I ruminated on whether to fix the site, upgrade to a newer Drupal, or just start over, and I finally settled on simplicity. However I could see it was going to be laborious to migrate all the old site content to Markdown files.
Robots to the rescue!
What Was Done
The old Drupal 6 site served faithfully for nearly two decades, but times change and maintaining a site built on a framework while PHP dependencies grew brittle, CAPTCHAs stop working, integrations break. Maintaining a dynamic database-driven site for a personal project felt increasingly like overkill. The answer was a static Jekyll site — fast, secure, and version-controlled with git.
Migrating the old site from Drupal’s MySQL database to clean Markdown files was no small task, so it definitely helped to have AI agents ready to jump into action, figure out the Drupal scheme and migrate it all to text files. The process was faltering, but always in a forward direction. Over many sessions we reorganized, cleaned up, and reformatted all the old content. We wrote scripts to convert all the old pages to Markdown, then we wrote some Jekyll plugins in Ruby as we went along for things like embedded YouTube videos and resizeable / zoomable images.
Of course one of the first things I engaged the agent to do was to to create the dark/light appearance toggle because I don’t want to destroy your night vision. The night/day toggle uses a 12-hour cookie and by default will use the setting of your device, so the site should be comfortable to read at any hour. (If you have a strong preference for light theme, let me know and I can make the cookie more persistent.)
The Site as a Platform
Websites in modern times can host anything you can imagine. The new site combines the speed of Jekyll with the flexibility of PHP in the back end for dynamic features. Modern browsers offer amazing possibilities for information design, simulations, and games, all with instant deployment and no middle-ware, fancy site hosting, or social network required. With a single command the whole site rebuild and deployment takes only a few seconds.
I’m especially excited about using this simplified space for my projects going forward. The FretPet X revival, articles about RepRap and Marlin Firmware, and future Unity 3D and THREE.js experiments all have a proper home here.
Looking Forward
The hybrid static/dynamic approach opens up possibilities I’m eager to explore. Regular cron jobs and occasional sessions working with my clankers will allow the site to host stats, dynamic content feeds, modern JavaScript apps, and whatever else we can dream up. I suppose some view of my occasional experiments could be of interest. I will be sure to keep you in the loop!
The old site lives on at old.thinkyhead.com as an archive — nothing lost, everything preserved. But the new site is where the action will be. I’ve got a lot of ideas in the works, and I’m looking forward to sharing them here. Stay tuned.