I posted the first SolderSmoke podcast in August of 2005. That was almost 21 years ago. I opened the soldersmoke.com Bluehost account in August 2006. Since that time I have been just updating the index file of soldersmoke.com each time we did a new podcast. Sometimes there would be links. Sometimes there would be imbedded pictures. At some point we started also doing videos of the podcast. And all the while there was a steady flow of "improvements" and updates to the html format of the web. I ignored all of these changes. Then, sometime in 2024, the editor that allowed me to update the soldersmoke.com site (without knowing any html) disappeared. Soon the index file fell into disrepair. I had been hoping to find a way to fix it. Peter Marks VK3TPM came to my rescue, just as he did when I needed to make a WordPress backup of the SolderSmoke blog.
Peter tells me that when he looked at the html of the index files (there were two!) his heart sank. Fixing this would involve going through and cleaning up each of the entries for 264 SolderSmoke podcasts. That would be a lot of work. But then it occurred to him: LET CLAUDE DO IT. That is what reduced the workload. Claude took to the task admirably, it wrote python scripts to parse the page, read the Soldersmoke blog to get other information and got the modification dates of the mp3 files to derive the publication dates. Claude was able to go through the podcasts, putting all of them in order, and eliminating any unnecssary links or images. A job that would have taken several days of tedious manual work was done by AI in an hour or so. The size of the index file shrunk from well in excess of the Bluehost editors 1 megabyte limit, to a much more manageable 300 kilo byte size.
All of us (especially me!) should be grateful to Peter for fixing this. And I joked with Peter that Claude and his AI colleagues should also be grateful -- they will have an easier time training on the sleek new index that now holds summaries of all the SolderSmoke podcasts.
Check out the new index: https://soldersmoke.com
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