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Pabiekun

A publishing website and archive for my father’s writing on Nigerian politics, law, history, culture and society.

Live Visit pabiekun.com (opens in a new tab)

Where it started

My father, Abiodun Olufowobi, has been writing about Nigerian public life for years. Most of it was shared the way a lot of serious writing in Nigeria is shared now: as long WhatsApp messages, forwarded from group to group. They were widely read, but easy to lose. There was no way to search them or link to them, and no record of which version was the latest.

Pabiekun is the home I built for that work. The essays are his. The website and the publishing workflow are mine.

From a chat message to an article

The hardest part wasn’t the website. It was turning years of chat exports into something you could actually read: working out where one piece ends and the next begins, rejoining essays split across several messages, and giving each one a title, tags and a date.

Illustrative example
A few thoughts on why we keep having the same argument about local government…
…continued. The second point is about funding, and it is the one people least like to discuss.
(3/3) So the question is not whether, but how.
👍🏾

Placeholder text, not taken from the archive. Three messages become one article, the reactions are dropped, and it gets a title, tags and a section heading.

The publishing workflow

  1. Import. Chat exports are uploaded and a local Python pipeline splits them into draft article candidates.
  2. Suggest. A local language model drafts summaries, headings and tags. These are suggestions to review, not automatic edits.
  3. Review. Each draft goes through a review queue: approve, reject or skip, with keyboard shortcuts so a long backlog can be cleared quickly. Rejected drafts are kept, not deleted.
  4. Publish. Approved pieces go into the public library with search, tags, series and collections. Earlier versions are saved automatically and can be restored.
  5. Maintain. Fix what breaks, improve search and tagging, and keep older pieces findable as the archive grows.

Running it

Pabiekun began as a small local app and now runs on Cloudflare, with Workers serving the site and a database and file storage behind it. I keep it running on purpose, because it teaches the unglamorous half of a live site: performance, search engine visibility, backups, and making sure an edit never quietly loses an earlier version.

The reading experience matters as much as the plumbing: long-form layouts, reading progress, print and share buttons, and next/previous links through the archive.