Today I want to write about the moment I felt the power of AI most strongly.
It is the story of a blog I had abandoned for six months, given up on completely, and then brought back to life in a single day by talking it through with an AI.
If you have a blog that stopped working, or something you are too scared to touch so you just leave it alone, I think this one will land. I am going to be honest and unvarnished about it.
One day, my blog went completely white
I run a fishing blog. It is a place I had built up carefully over a long time, something like my own castle.
The trouble started with a rental server move. The hosting service I had been using was shutting down, so I decided to move everything to a different host, Xserver. I took a backup, I moved the data, and I thought that was that.
Except it wasn’t. When I opened the blog on the new host, the screen was completely white. No posts, no photos, nothing displayed at all. I tried again and again, and it never made a sound.
I panicked. I really did.
There were people out there who looked forward to my blog. One reader sent me a message on Instagram saying they couldn’t see the site anymore. And I could not fix it. There was nothing I could do with my own skills.
The hardest part was not knowing what was wrong
I tried to repair it myself many times. I searched the web, I tried this and that. None of it worked.
Looking back, the hardest part was this: I could not see which part was broken, or what I was supposed to do about it.
Errors appeared. But I didn’t understand what they meant. I had no idea what the cause might be. It felt like groping around a pitch-dark room for a light switch when you don’t even know which wall it is on. That invisibility was the real difficulty for someone like me, with no technical background.
In the end, I gave up. I left the blog untouched for six months.
It never stopped nagging at me. “I really have to do something about that blog.” But I could not summon the energy to face that white screen one more time.
Facing it again, this time with a partner
After I started using AI (I wrote about how that began in the first post of this series), a thought came to me out of nowhere. “That blog I abandoned. Maybe with AI, I could actually fix it?”
Half-doubting, I brought it to my AI partner Kuro (Claude). And what happened was that we identified the causes, one at a time, in order.
Here is what we actually did together. Some technical words show up, but you don’t need to understand them in detail. Just look at it as “so that’s the kind of work it was.”
- The SSL certificate had expired. That is the certificate that lets a site be displayed securely, so we renewed it.
- Next we went through the plugins (the add-on parts that give WordPress extra functions) one by one, checked them, and cleaned them up. That turned out to be one of the big causes of the white screen.
- Then we moved the theme, the part that decides how the blog looks, over to a new one called Cocoon, and repaired the broken layout.
- After that we worked through the smaller things: setting up the access analytics again, registering the site with search engines, and so on.
One step at a time. “This might be the cause.” “Then let’s try this.” A conversation, going back and forth. And the problem I had been utterly helpless against slowly came undone.
The recovery was almost disappointingly easy
And then the blog was back.
Honestly, I was overjoyed. A thorn that had been stuck in me for six months was finally pulled out. But at the same time, it was anticlimactic in how easy it turned out to be. Six months of struggling, six months of having given up, and once I talked it through with AI it was done in a day.
That was the moment I thought, from the bottom of my heart: the power of AI is remarkable.
On my own, that blog would probably have stayed white forever. But just having something beside me that thinks it through with me changes everything. It turns “things I don’t understand” into “things I understand.” That, I learned first-hand, is the real value of AI.
One thing I regret, for anyone about to move hosts
Let me put down one honest regret.
I only found out afterwards that Xserver has an official feature called “WordPress Simple Migration,” which moves a blog across almost automatically. Even coming from another company’s server, you enter the necessary information and it handles most of the tedious work for you.
If I had used that from the start, I would not have suffered the way I did, and I might not have left the blog sitting for six months. So to anyone planning to move a blog, I want to say this loudly:
If your host offers an automatic migration feature, use it. Do it by hand and you can fall into the same white-screen hell I did.
If you are about to start with AI
If you also have something you want to fix but have left alone because it is too hard, a blog, a computer setting, anything at all, try facing it again with AI beside you.
A problem that looks hopelessly difficult on your own turns into a list of tasks you can clear one by one when you work through it in conversation. You can ask about anything you don’t understand, the moment you don’t understand it. You get told what to do next. That alone is sometimes enough to get something moving again that you had already written off.
My “white blog” might be something else entirely for you.
Next time I will write about what I did with the momentum from that recovery: I wrote out everything I wanted to do. It is the record of taking stock of every idea in my head with AI and turning them into a plan.
One last note. Server and WordPress recovery work varies enormously depending on the situation, both in cause and in procedure. This article is a record of my personal experience, and the same steps will not fix everything. Please back up anything important before you start.
If you want to see where this journey began, I wrote about it in the day I started with AI in my forties. And the follow-up to this recovery, where I dumped every idea in my head onto one plan, is here: brainstorming an idea inventory with AI.
