A month ago, I made the decision to revamp MyMac.com, and remembered a huge issue: a LOT of our archived content is not online. So before anything else, I need to bring all our missing content back online. It was still all on the site, but because of a WordPress bug and one of our themes, everything that was classified as a “blog post” way back in the mid-2000s went offline. For some reason, each had a date of .-0001, so they were effectively gone. In the database, but not visible.
I’ve been lazy and busy at the same time. I knew I could get them all back online, but I knew it would have to be done manually, one post/article at a time. I would have to go into each one, change the date, and they would show back up in the archives.
I don’t know exactly when each post was first published, just the year. So I made the decision early on in this clean-up effort to not worry about the actual month or day part of the date, just the year. Maybe later, when it’s all back online, I will do some internet sleuthing and fix that, too. But not right now.
An even larger issue is one of migration. For reasons known only to the Text Gods of the universe, many, MANY articles and posts had garbled text. Here is an example:
Supposing you update your phone a few months after purchase? In that case, you’ll need to order a new adhesive adapter from lifeproof.com for $20. If you make a mistake getting the original adaptor mounted, you’re in the same sunken boat.
Notice the garbled text going on? Yeah, me, too. And this problem is not only limited to the posts that went dark from the bug described above, but is across the entire site dating back from 1995 up until around 2020 or so. I think it may be a formatting issue. Many writers back in the day would use a word processor application, like Word, AppleWorks, Claris, etc. to write their articles. They would then simply copy/paste them into the website. Back before the days of WordPress, this was not an issue. But the migration gods are angry and mean beasts, hence this issue now.
The bigger problem? We have thousands of post / articles that fit that category. For reference, we have been publishing for 30 years online as of 2025.
There is no “click to fix” this problem in WordPress. There is no magic bullet to automatically fix these issues. The fix is for me to, manually, go into each post and fix it. (Spell check does not fix it, BTW)
While talking with David Cohen on the latest episode of TechFan, I described trying to us AI to solve the issue, and in the middle of that chat, I found that DeepSeek could do just what I was looking for. All it took was this simple prompt:
Clean up this texting without changing the wording:
That’s it!
Here is the same text from above after using that prompt in DeepSeek:
Pretty nifty! And free to use!
The only drawback is the same as it was before: time. Each DeepSeek cleanup takes a little bit of time. For one article it can take about a minute to replace all the broken text. A minute does not seem long, I know. But again, there are somewhere around 10,000 posts that need to be manually looked at and, if needed, cleaned up. A minute adds up quickly!
DeepSeek also is not connected other the site, so I have to copy/paste what I want cleaned up in DeepSeek, then manually copy/paste back onto the site. Another issue: if there is a graphics in the article, I can’t copy that, just text, so if one review has ten paragraphs and five pictures, that is ten copy/paste to and from DeepSeek.
Why do all this? Well, we will be re-launching MyMac.com with an all-new design later this year, adding new writers, new types of content, and getting back to our roots. While Podcasting is a blast, that has bene the main focus of all content over the last few years, and I think more and more people are wanting good product reviews, good opinion pieces, and something new to read! And with 30 years of publishing in our belt, we know how to do it!
Thinking about writing? Reviewing? Let me know! We are looking for new writers today, even before the relaunch!
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