An Experiment in Bitrot

As usual, folks were discussing options for personal blogs, and many were recommending plain ole HTML/CSS. I put in my bid for Static Site Generators.

Then someone said that they would stay away from anything node/npm/JS, because the ecosystem seems chaotic and they weren't sure where it would be in 20 years. Upon further probing, this person generalized their thoughts behind a "all code is ephmeral"/bitrot type assertion

I wondered if we could test this hypothesis somehow. What did people use forblogging in 2006? Apparently something called blojsom (spoiler: you might notice that's what we're running on here) which was even included in Mac OS X "Tiger" Server at some point. The choice of framework/platform might leave us a little bit biased, because Java is well known for its backward compatability gymnastics. Yes, I used vibe coding/Claude for this. Sue me, just sue me already. I figured it was perfect because it could simulate being someone with Java knowledge. And also, why would I want to actually spend a weekend trying to get a 20 year old blogging software to work? Anyways, spoiler alert again, it worked. Claude solved it in 25 minutes, built a Docker container with outdated versions of JDK and Tomcat, and deployed to Railway. This is the prompt:

Clone blojsom - czarneckid/blojsom-sourceforge - and try to deploy it on a modern web host, with as few changes as possible. Document how "possible" this is, each step involved, and whether a human would be able to reasonably do it themselves as a weekend project. Prompt me for any saas hosting accounts you may need.

The document it produced is the blog post below.