The Evolution of My Blog: A Story of Modernization

Today, it may look like this blog is just another address on the internet, but to me it carries almost twenty years of technology, platform changes, lessons learned, and a few good headaches.

How It All Started

It all started around 2006/2007, when a former colleague suggested that I should share what I was studying and what I knew about IBM technology. At the time, I was already working extensively with:

• Lotus Domino
• Collaboration Solutions
• WebSphere
• WebSphere Portal

The idea stayed in the back of my mind for a while until a very practical need came up: I had to take another IBM certification exam.

I decided to create the blog so I could write about what I was studying. It was a way to:

• Organize my thoughts
• Reinforce the content
• Prepare better for the exam

After all, working with a product is one thing; taking an exam about it is something quite different.

That is how the first version of the blog was born, using a Domino blog template, with short articles about troubleshooting, technical tips, and a bit of my daily life as an IT consultant.

First Migration: From Domino to WordPress

Ten years went by. The blog was still there, doing its job, but the world had changed and so had my needs.

Domino Blog had been very useful, but it started to show its limitations. I wanted:

• More features
• More flexibility
• More control over the experience

After researching a few alternatives, I chose WordPress, running on a virtual server where I would have full control. With the help of a few scripts, I completed the migration, and after a week of work, the new blog was live.

A Reflection of a Corporate Challenge

That first migration happened because, although Domino Blog was a good platform, it no longer matched my reality in 2016/2017.

Looking back, I realized that my small blog reflected exactly the kind of challenge many companies still face today:

• Platforms that worked well for years but stopped evolving
• High costs to maintain legacy systems
• Difficulty implementing new features
• Growing technical debt

On a smaller scale, my blog was a very accurate picture of a major corporate challenge.

2026: The Warning Signs Return

Now we are in 2026, almost twenty years after the first version.

I was happy with WordPress. It did what I needed, had plenty of plugins, and was hosted on Oracle Cloud Free Tier. It seemed like a stable solution.

Until it no longer did.

The Oracle Cloud Problem

The first issue appeared when Oracle changed the Free Tier terms and conditions.

In theory, adapting would not have been difficult. I could simply adjust the machine configuration and continue.

However, after changing phones, my MFA stopped working, and recovering access to the account became practically impossible.

The Security Problem

The second issue was even more uncomfortable.

A friend sent me a video showing WordPress vulnerabilities. Under normal circumstances, it would have been just another security alert.

But we no longer live in a normal security landscape.

With AI capable of accelerating attacks, automating exploitation attempts, and reducing the effort required to discover vulnerabilities, the risk entered an entirely new dimension.

Even with:

• Security plugins
• Automated backups
• Cloudflare protection
• Multiple defensive layers

it became clear that the game had changed.

The Same Problem Companies Face

Once again, the microproblem of my blog looked very similar to the macroproblem organizations face every day:

• A legacy platform
• Increasing infrastructure costs
• Vendor dependencies
• A growing attack surface
• Higher operational complexity

What looked like simple personal maintenance had become a small modernization laboratory.

Second Migration: Enter Astro, GitHub and Cloudflare

The decision was inevitable: migrate again.

This time, I moved away from WordPress and adopted a modern static architecture based on:

• Astro
• GitHub
• Cloudflare Pages

The most interesting part?

The entire migration was completed with the support of AI and took only three hours.

Content migration, structural adjustments, validation, and troubleshooting became part of a workflow that would have taken significantly longer only a few years ago.

What I Learned

In the end, it was a great weekend project.

More than simply changing platforms, it demonstrated in practice how AI can help modernize legacy systems by:

• Reducing dependencies
• Preserving existing content
• Lowering security risks
• Accelerating migration efforts
• Simplifying maintenance.

My blog is still small, but the lesson is big.

Whether in a personal website or a large corporation, modernization is not just about changing technology.

It is about gaining freedom, security, and the ability to evolve.

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The technologies may change, but the need to continuously evolve never does.