Relaunching My Father's Website

I have restored and re-launched my father Laurence Poh's website - https://laurencepoh.com as a memorial site.

Some years back, I took it down as I was moving hosting providers, and there were issues with the site that I didn't have the time to look at and deal with. It just became yet another unfinished project.

So last week, I decided to take a look through all my archives and backups of the site and try to rebuild it. I also wanted to try using Claude Code and Anthropic's Opus 4.6 LLM to help me with the coding. The requirements were relatively simple. I wanted the site to become a memorial to honour his legacy, an archive of his writing and photography, and since it won't be 'live' it doesn't need a full-blown CMS (content-management system) for regular updates, it would be a static site, which means it doesn't need a database, and it will load super fast.

One thing the old website from 2004 had, was an online guestbook. This had heartfelt messages sent from friends, fans and family from all over the world, sending their condolences and acknowledgment of his contributions to the photography and birding community.

I thought I had saved the guestbook database somewhere safe, but I could not find it in my backups. However, I had a look on the Wayback Machine web archive, and it had an almost complete copy of his website. I found a tool to download the whole site from there, and incredibly, it also had every guestbook entry, except that it was all in HTML and not structured data, which would be time-consuming to extract by hand.

So, with a bit of prompting and giving Claude access to both the website scraped from the Wayback Machine, as well as my own backups, it was able to help me with coding up a few scripts to pull out the guestbook entries, as well as the image gallery metadata, and also the articles and blog entries, from their proprietary formats, into plain text Markdown files and structured JSON data.

I then prompted it to build a static website for it. I stated my goals and intentions, and a design direction. It came up with a proposal which I reviewed and fine-tuned, and created an implementation plan for it. After that, I let it do its thing, which took maybe 10-20 minutes. I don't have a good sense of the actual time, as it stops frequently to ask permission to do certain actions, and I'm not confident enough to let it have full autonomy to do stuff unmonitored. Claude created the scripts, configuration and HTML templates, and generated the website. All of the content from the old website was original, though it did generate some new text for the homepage for the introduction, which I reviewed and made some changes and corrections. All the other content seemed to be exactly 1:1 so it didn't hallucinate anything new that wasn't in the original articles.

It took me a few hours to review the website it created, and a bit of back and forth to tweak the colour scheme, and to fix some issues with the conversion scripts. When I was happy with how the site looked on my development machine, I deployed it to a publicly-accessibly server and updated the DNS to have it go live. I have to say the end result is pretty good. All up, it took me about 2-3 days, when it would have taken me probably a week or more to do this otherwise.

I'm just happy that my father's site is now back online, and all the links to his site now work again. He was called the 'Father of Digiscoping' and hopefully he would be remembered for this, even though nature photography has come a long way since then, yet a new generation of photographers are (re-)discovering the technique by attaching their mobile phone cameras to scopes, and there are so many more commercially available adapters to accomplish this now. Even my own astrophotography uses a similar technique of attaching a specialised digital camera to a telescope!

Anyway, please take a look at the new and refreshed https://laurencepoh.com and tell me what you think, and let me know if you spot any errors or problems.