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Rebuilding my twenty-year old music blog. Twice.

A screenshot of the new Burgoblog homepage

TL;DR: I had a 20-year-old music blog still sitting on $20/month shared hosting and looking… well, a bit tired. So I did two things across two weekends: first I lifted the whole thing off WordPress onto Vercel’s free tier as a static export, then I went back and rebuilt it from scratch in Astro with a proper design system — vinyl-record metaphor and all. Live at burgoblog.com, still free, and just maybe it will get me back into music blogging.

Why bother

Burgoblog is the music blog I started back in 2006 — when getting on the Hype Machine top 10 felt like making it. I haven’t posted regularly in years, but I’m genuinely proud of a lot of what’s in there. The “30 South African Bands You NEED to Hear” post still occasionally picks up a comment. My annual Top Albums lists are the closest thing I have to a personal tradition.

What I wasn’t proud of:

  • I was paying $20/month to host an archive I barely touched.
  • The site ran on WordPress + LiteSpeed Cache + cPanel — a death-by-a-thousand-cuts setup every time I wanted to do anything.
  • The design hadn’t materially changed since about 2013.
  • Loading a single post took more roundtrips than the post had words.

It had become a small monthly tax I was paying on past-me’s hosting decisions.

Phase 1: get off the hosting bill

The first move was the simple one: get it off paid hosting without losing anything.

  • Used the Simply Static WordPress plugin to export the whole site to flat HTML.
  • Pushed the archive to Vercel’s free tier (legitimate for non-commercial personal sites).
  • Pointed the domain from GoDaddy via A and CNAME records.

The “simple” part lasted about ten minutes before LiteSpeed Cache started fighting back. The export was full of base64 SVG placeholders where image src attributes used to live. The theme CSS was missing entirely, because LiteSpeed had been serving a dynamically-generated UCSS file the export didn’t capture. Early-era images stored in wp-content/ root instead of wp-content/uploads/ were nowhere to be found. Even the Gravatar avatars in the comments had been cached locally in a weird LiteSpeed-only directory.

A few hours of Python scripting later — strip the SVG placeholders, rewrite the link tags, surgically pull missing assets from the live server before I killed it — and the static archive looked exactly like the old site, served at $0/month. Thanks, Claude Code!

Mission accomplished. Sort of. The site was free, but it still looked like the site.

Phase 2: rebuild it properly

I left it a day and then thought: while I’m here, I may as well make it something I actually like.

So I used Claude Design to explore a few directions. The one that stuck was a vinyl/liner-notes metaphor — Side A featured posts, Side B as a tracklist of recent reads, and “The Vault” for the year archives. Then I briefed Claude Code to rebuild the whole site as a static Astro project against that design system.

The hard part wasn’t the framework choice. The hard part was the migration:

  • 1,261 pages to generate — every post, tag archive, category archive, and year archive.
  • Every URL preserved. No broken inbound links from a decade of music-blog cross-pollination.
  • 70 of 84 missing images recovered, between the live mirror and the Wayback Machine.
  • All 163 comments on the 30-bands post backfilled into the new template.
  • ~75% of broken pre-2008 links resurrected. The rest are lost to time.

Swapped the Vercel build root over, watched 20 years of archive light up under the new design, and called it done.

What I learned

  • LiteSpeed Cache will ruin your export day. If you’re ever migrating a LiteSpeed-served WordPress site to static, plan a day for fixing things the cache rewrote behind your back.
  • Vercel’s free tier is genuinely excellent for personal archives. Cloudflare Pages is the better call for commercial work (which is where I put conversationmedia.com.au), but for a music blog with no revenue, Vercel is hard to beat.
  • AI-assisted design + code is a force multiplier for solo projects. Three years ago this redesign would have been a six-month “I’ll get to it” promise to myself. I shipped it across 2 days over a couple of weekends.
  • Static site generators are the right answer for archives. No database, no plugins, no security updates, no hosting bill that creeps up every year. Just files.

Have a look

burgoblog.com — the homepage is probably the best entry point. And now that I’m reinvigorated with the new look, I might even go write something new on it.