It's been a wild 2 days...
Well, I've done it. As of today, October 6th 2026, I've formally migrated away from Weebly.
It's something I wanted to do for a while. Those of you who have been around long enough probably already know that but it never came to fruition back when I first attempted it in 2024 due to...well, let's say life kinda kicked me in the balls.
But just recently, I found out that Weebly has ceased operations in about 67 other countries and that, to me, was the smoking gun that I needed in order to realize that I need to get off Weebly sooner rather than later. That was my cue.
Now, if you know me, you'll know that I don't like AI. A lot of people don't. But in this scenario, I was genuinely a fish out of water. I didn't want to remake my entire website that I've maintained on Weebly since 2014 on a different website builder. Remaking absolutely everything from scratch, re-downloading all of the assets and everything, would take a huge amount of time. It's why the process felt super daunting to me to begin with. I've tackled this twice, once on WordPress and once on Wix but...I couldn't find the motivation to just keep going, remaking everything from scratch, effectively doing the work I had already done again. It's the most demotivating thing you could do and it made me feel hopeless. Hopeless that 12 years of my work would just be swallowed up by the sands of time.
So I caved and asked for assistance from an LLM. Google Gemini, to be specific, since it's literally right there and I already have a Google account (who doesn't these days...). And with its help, I was able to successfully extract my entire Weebly website, download it locally and preserve its contents on GitHub.
But the export wasn't...perfect, let's say. The initial export was incredibly, and I mean incredibly buggy. The styling seemed rather buggy, the navigation was fairly broken, embeds weren't exactly working...there was a lot to fix.
So I continued to work with Google Gemini and honestly...it felt like bashing my head against the wall with it. I repeatedly told it that I want specific things fixed and it just kind of ruined things even more and I was really getting frustrated. I spent a good 6-8 hours on October 5th just...telling Gemini that its proposed fixes just weren't working and, in fact, broke things even further.
Eventually, on October 6th (that's today!) I managed to get it looking sort of, kind of accurate to the Weebly version, but it had issues. But I felt confident enough sharing my repository with a few of my friends to hopefully get some feedback.
One friend said that looking at my repository is like "having a coding project they're excited about", which is good news! I might actually have a helpful maintainer in the future!
Another friend suggested that I use an LLM that's specifically built for use-cases like these and not rely on a general-purpose LLM such as Google Gemini. They then gave me access to their own LLM they use for software development and said I can use it as well to help me getting things working.
And holy hell, that new LLM genuinely did in 1 hour what it took Google Gemini to do in 2 days. It cleanly refactored the entire repo's structure, fixed the navigation menu (including fixing bugs that Google Gemini introduced) and just did so many QoL fixes that I wasn't even going to bother with initially (such as the broken RSS feed).
Having this experience, I'll be honest, changed my perspective on AI just a bit. I'm still very broadly against it. Generative AI is still a cancer that I wish was never invented. But for use-cases like this - archiving my already existing thing that I've had for 12 years - and making it more "future-proof"...I'll be honest, it's grown on me.
I would've otherwise been stranded, looking for ways of archiving everything or doing absolutely every single little thing by hand. Considering that my website has over 120 individual HTML pages with dependencies to random places...trust me, this is something that would've taken me MONTHS to do. The fact I got it done in 2 days is genuinely just wild to me.
But anyway. Moving forward, this will be the new "personal blog". I hope that those who cared to follow along on Weebly won't mind the change.
Thanks for reading.
- huu