According to the whois command, I’ve owned the domain ogmaciel.com since January 21, 2001, and I believe it was the very first domain I ever bought. Since then, I’ve purchased multiple domains for all sorts of ideas and projects, but this one I’ve kept — and renewed faithfully — since day one.
Over the years, I’ve self-hosted (cutting my teeth on Linux by building and maintaining LAMP stacks) and used paid hosting services to run my personal blog. I used WordPress back when it was the coolest blogging platform out there, and I’ve hand-crafted HTML sites — and everything in between. I wrote prolifically about anything and everything for many years, and I’ve lost more posts than I care to admit as I switched platforms (and occasionally forgot to back things up).
In other words, I have a long history with blogging. But eventually, I fell out of love with it. I didn’t want to keep paying to host things anymore, so I invested time in converting what survived — about 1,100 posts — into reStructuredText, then Markdown, and migrated them to Hugo + GitHub Pages to preserve what I could. Then, I just… moved on.
A few years ago, though, I felt that familiar urge to write again — to build new things, and to have a place where I could stash my thoughts in the hope that maybe, just maybe, someone else might find them interesting or even useful. For almost two years, I’d been writing book recommendations on Substack, one a week, with no agenda other than finding other readers who might share their own suggestions. I guess I was looking for community. But over time, it started to feel like a one-way street — I had subscribers, but very little engagement. It felt lonely, if I’m being honest.
A little more than two weeks ago, the writing itch came back again — this time as a personal challenge: to write something every day, no matter what. My goal wasn’t audience growth or perfection, just to get thoughts out of my head and onto the page. It’s already helped me pick up one of my stalled writing projects again, which feels like a win.
Recently, I was talking with an old friend who also runs his personal site using a static site generator. He writes almost daily and hosts everything on his own domain, like I did before. He told me:
“You should consider moving your posts back to your own domain — you don’t want someone else owning your content, or risk losing it if Substack ever changes its practices.”
I told him Substack gives me easy access to a large community of readers — something harder to build from scratch — but his point hit home. While I plan to keep publishing here, I’ve also decided to create a backup copy hosted on my personal domain via GitHub Pages.
By then, I already had 16 published posts, and I didn’t want to copy and paste everything manually or reformat HTML to Markdown. So… I outsourced it to an AI tool, while also asking it to give my blog a facelift — new theme, attributions, image downloads, the works. In about 5 minutes, after crafting a detailed prompt with all the instructions, I released the (AI) kraken and went to grab a coffee. When I came back, everything had been migrated and updated.
Could I have done it all myself? Absolutely. But this was so much easier. I spent another hour tweaking small things, but I didn’t write a single line of Markdown manually.
Now, some of you may be thinking: “Here’s another software engineer falling prey to the lure of the easy AI life — a slippery slope toward obsolescence.” If that’s your take, I won’t argue. Used carelessly, AI tools can become a crutch or an excuse not to learn.
But — and here’s where I might win you over or lose you — in the hands of someone who is technically capable and understands the task, using AI as an aid to offload the repetitive parts so you can focus on more creative or impactful work is something you owe to yourself.
Do I know how to write Markdown, download images, and migrate my Substack posts manually? Absolutely. Did I rob myself of a learning opportunity by letting AI handle it? I don’t think so.