Meeting Claude - Returning to my Roots

In May 2026, I tried to resurrect my WordPress blog. I fiddled with it and just hated how it looked, how it presented, how hard it was to edit, and how it handled photographs. I had to make a change.

Nick Covanes is a friend who manages the church website for Grace. So I called him and asked where I should rehost the blog. His response was that it was a long answer, better done in person.

He came over on a Friday and showed me some alternatives. He was a Claude evangelist. Claude is an AI assistant produced by Anthropic, and it has a desktop feature called Cowork. Within a couple of hours he had developed a new web presence on {caution: geek speak follows} Cloudflare with backing store on GitHub, and migrated all of the stories and photos from WordPress to this new website. Two hours! I was hooked.

The new website was not perfect, so early Saturday I jumped into my own Cowork and fixed some warts. So cool.

In 1990, my sister Janice gave me her handwritten genealogical information on both the Golden and Barrett lines. It is super neat but somewhat unwieldy to use. I always wanted to improve it using one of the heritage websites, but was put off by the cost.

I described to Cowork what I wanted to do: generate a family tree website from handwritten information. Cowork’s response was for me to scan a few pages and upload them. After a review, the response was to “scan it all.”

I scanned it all in, Cowork did optical character recognition, and built an awesome website. The OCR was imperfect, so I had some corrections to do. That’s a work in progress—a blessing, because I get to see up close some of my ancestors.

Kathy and I, as an artist and a photographer, have to work hard to keep track of our art and photographs: where each piece has been shown, any awards from shows, sales, gifts, donations. This is a common problem for our art colleagues, and I had some ideas for a website. Long story short, I consulted Cowork, and over about a two-week period we came up with an Artist Catalog Manager called Artie.

Interestingly, this work brought me back to my programmer roots. Over my career there were periods where developing, testing, and deploying products could consume me—heads down, working long stints, waking up with a good idea and going after it. It turns out that I love it. And now I’m sorta back into it for a while.