Hello site migration, my old friend

This website, my personal one, was brought to life in April 2011. Much of its older content was written when I wasn’t even 18 years old. In particular, the content from the first couple years has recurring themes to it: my struggles with free web hosting, free (sub)domains, unplanned server migrations - much of it only possible thanks to the generosity and patience of online friends, as I didn’t want to beg my family for money for my highly technical online adventures. In fact, I even wrote about how the registration of gbl08ma.com was a gift from a friend, at a point when the blog was already six months old.

The one thing that had been mostly constant throughout, was the technology stack powering the website. Sure, there were definitely changes over time: at some point I started using nginx instead of Apache; MySQL was replaced by its fork, MariaDB; PHP went through different major upgrades; I won’t even mention the underlying Linux distro changes. But in the end, it was always powered by a WordPress instance that suffered through multiple major version upgrades and server migrations of different kinds and intensities - from the “my backups are broken and I need to copy my posts from the Google search cache” kind¹, all the way to “let’s copy this VM image across half of Europe,” with honorable mentions to the “let’s dump the database, archive the Wordpress folder, and restore elsewhere” type of migration.

Recently, mostly for security reasons, I wanted to move away from the complexity of such a large PHP application, ideally, to something that wouldn’t even require a database server. In May 2026, I finally put in the effort to find an alternative technology stack that I was happy with. After consulting Bluesky, I decided to combine a self-hosted instance of lichen.page with Hugo.

This was more of a team effort than initially anticipated: lichen.page is still in its early days and that Bluesky thread gained many nested conversation levels, as notplants (the lichen.page developer) patiently fixed all the problems I ran into. I’m not too worried about its immaturity: it is acting just as a CMS for my static Hugo-powered site, and if lichen breaks or if I get tired of it, I can just take all of the files and publish the website in a more conventional fashion.

I migrated all posts to Markdown files, through a mix of automation and manual work. I didn’t use the help of LLMs for fear that they’d accidentally fix the broken English of the earlier content. I took the opportunity to fix some broken image URLs, and adding “2026 editor’s notes” throughout.

I added secondary headlines to each post in order to make them fit with my latest two posts, that already had such headlines and had originally been published only on Leaflet. There’s no denying that my current thoughts and knowledge bled through some of the headlines written for the older posts, and many of them are outright snarky.

I ensured the links to the old posts still rendered the right posts in the new version - through some Caddy rewrite directives. I made the old RSS feed URL work too, in unlikely chance that anyone is consuming that. Finally, I archived my Wordpress instance.

Homage paid, gbl08ma.com migrated again - shortly after its 15th anniversary.

For the most part, my earlier posts are truly irrelevant in the present day. They are poorly written (with broken English spelling and grammar) and do not necessarily paint me in a good light, but they are the proof of the path I walked. For everyone’s sanity, posts older than five years will have their date highlighted, and for good measure, I added a high-visibility disclaimer to the top of all posts more than ten years old, ensuring everyone is aware of how much I despise them.

I also migrated all of the publicly-visible comments on the old website. I decided to preserve those too, as they were often cringier/funnier than my own writing, and also because some of them are my own writing, as I was definitely the type of person who had time to argue on the internet.

To be fair to my past self, not all of the older posts are truly terrible. Some are just mediocre. Here are some that may still hold some value today, even if their form isn’t up to my current standards:

• June 2011, Right-click blocking - something which still plagues some websites today.

• June 2011, Websites asking for full name, web security experts say don’t - definitely still topical today, even if, and particularly after this current AI craze, opinions are slowly changing, as many say we’ll have to increasingly tie our online activities with our real identities, to prove our humanity. This post is, in a way, a prequel to my comparatively very recent post On illegal software.

• October 2011, My first Slashdot submission was… accepted! - in the middle of this self-congratulatory orgy, there’s the revelation that I briefly exchanged private messages with Liz Upton, the co-founder of Raspberry Pi, on their forums. Sadly they removed the DM functionality and all I have as proof is an email letting me know I received a DM from liz, but without showing its contents.

• November 2011, The Raspberry Pi: What it is and why it will make a difference - further confirmation that I was really shilling for Raspberry Pi. They never sent me even a t-shirt, let alone a Pi. Yes, I would go on to buy three of them (a 1B+, a 2B, and a 4B). My sentiment on that blog post was right, though. It’s too bad they didn’t remain a true non-profit.

• February 2015, A use for NT on ARM, after all - this one is fun because, in addition to also being Raspberry Pi-related, it shows that I was yet to account for the aarch64 revolution that would come the next decade (thanks Apple? Or more likely, no-thanks Intel).

• July 2015, Windows 10 is unfinished - this one is noteworthy because it was the most popular content ever published on this website, even if, looking back, it is admittedly mostly a hater’s rant about Windows 10. Still, my criticisms, even if focused on looks rather than functionality, remained mostly valid throughout the life of Windows 10. Windows 11 would have deserved an even worse hit piece, but instead, I spent the time migrating back to Linux. Thanks Valve for sponsoring Wine/Proton, by the way.

• June 2016, HTTPS on this blog - despite its brevity, this one is a reminder of how relatively late we got something we now take for granted; at the same time, part of my still feels like Let’s Encrypt hasn’t been around for that long.

Around this time, between 2017 and 2018, is when I would say that my thoughts became clearer and my posts earned a bit better style and substance. By this time, I had already finished my Bachelor’s and was working on my Master’s degree. I had enjoyed / suffered through some minutes of fame on Portuguese web media, thanks to my software project focused on the Lisbon Metro, UnderLX. Finally, I had experienced good times working in teams, both inside and outside of educational settings. My self-confidence was high. I was in my early twenties, and present-day me, barely still in his twenties, believes it showed in my writing.

• August 2018, I really like Discord. It’s a monster, it scares me - this one is interesting because of how much it misses the mark. Discord went on to discontinue its games store, and Steam rightfully continues to reign supreme in that market; Discord broadened its target market beyond gamers. With this said, many of the concerns I present on that page are still valid, and today, my love-hate relationship with Discord is significantly more on the hate side than it was back then.

• March 2019, Developing for Android is like being a (demonetized) YouTuber - this is the one that largely explains why I lost interest in developing Android apps. The sentiment was popular at the time (still is, I think) and much like the Windows 10 hit piece, this “went viral,” at least compared to what’s typical for this website. I feel like I had much better arguments in this one, and most of them are still relevant today. Half a decade after losing me as a developer, Android might be close to losing me as a user: I’ve began to wonder if the ever-decreasing remaining freedoms aren’t worth trading for the increased security of iOS. Fortunately, Liquid Glass looks bad enough to make the decision easy… for now.

• April 2020, The limitations of hiding limitations: a striped case study - this one, an article about AI from the pre-ChatGPT era, might seem woefully outdated by now. But some of my thoughts in there are still relevant.

• October 2020, TIME for a WTF MySQL moment - possibly the first, perhaps only, example of a properly written technical post on this blog, as in, one that actually talks about technical topics, not technology-political topics (as was the case with e.g. the Android development piece, or the much earlier Raspberry Pi piece).

I’ll end the list here, as I’m overall still sufficiently happy with all of the posts I wrote past this point; I don’t think I need to make a selection as I’ve just done with my older posts.

I could have opted to preserve just these posts that I currently consider to be the “best of” - but who’s to say that my future self will agree regarding what posts were worth keeping? I decided not to play editor too hard. The posts, all together, with the garbage ones in the middle: that’s what actually tells a good part of my story.

This website would just not feel the same to me, without the many earlier posts about website downtime, domains being flagged as malicious, or free services not upholding their end of some non-existent contract. The posts reminding people I’m alive and apologizing for not posting often enough, as if anyone really cared. The posts where anyone can tell I was probably bullied in school. The posts where, through the years, I oscillate between a die-hard Windows/Microsoft hater who wants nothing but the finest Linux distros, and someone who actually uses Windows daily and needs it to be better.²

These poorly written posts add context that would otherwise be missing; part of me even wishes I had written more of those!³ At some point in my later teenage years, I realized how cringeworthy many of these posts were. I think this led to losing part of my interest in writing, out of some sort of shame, I suppose. I think that shame still persists to this day, and it’s still difficult for me to write about any more personal topics. My tone became, perhaps, overly professional? Or is it just the sound of becoming an adult?