How Losing My Domain Made Me Rebuild My Website

💀 The Death of frogrammer.net

It all started when I got an email from my domain registrar: my domain had expired.

After 6 years of owning frogrammer.net, I somehow just... forgot to renew it. And that was that. It was gone.

Let me say that again, mostly for myself:
I had a domain.
I forgot to renew the domain.
I no longer have a domain.

After a few unsuccessful attempts to re-buy it (and a small spiral of denial), I gave up. Someone else owns it now. Frogrammer.net, RIP.

How losing my domain made me rebuild my blog cover image

🧹 Spring Cleaning My Tech Stack

When I first built my website, I went with WordPress—mainly because of the plugin ecosystem, built-in SEO tools, comments support, and all the bells and whistles.

But a lot has changed since then.
Tech got better. I got better.
Now, with frameworks like Next.js, I can build with React and get great SEO out of the box.

And honestly? Most of those WordPress plugins I originally installed were either turned off or left unupdated, because maintaining them felt like a chore. Time for something simpler.

✨ A New Beginning: frogrammer.co

This time around, I wanted something that felt lighter, more dev-friendly, and less tied to drag-and-drop tools. No more WordPress. No more plugin roulette.

Just a domain and hosting. That's it.

🧱 The Stack: Next.js + Tailwind + Markdown

I built the new version using the Tailwind Next.js Starter Blog, which gave me everything I needed to hit the ground running. Blog structure, Tailwind integration, dark mode, RSS—done.

Everything is built with:

Next.js for the app framework
Tailwind CSS for styling — not my favorite, but hey, that’s what the cool kids are using, and it came with the template
MDX for writing posts (more on that in a sec)
Deployed on Vercel, which offers a super smooth dev experience

🎨 Prompting AI is an Art Form

Instead of just copying the content, Cursor kept trying to “improve” it—rewriting parts, adding summaries, adding stock images.
Hey Cursor, this is my blog, my typos!

After a few rounds of prompting and manual validations, it finally completed the task of transforming most of the posts to MDX format.
For some reason it didn’t parse the links and images correctly, so a bit of patching was needed there as well.

While AI helped speed things up, it definitely wasn’t hands-off.

ChatGPT was a different flavor of the same challenge:
I use it mainly for grammar fixes and flow improvements, but I had to be specific—or else it would sterilize my voice into generic tech-blog phrasing. And I am a snowflake ❄️, thank you very much.

Lesson: AI is powerful, but it still needs a babysitter.

🧵 Final Thoughts

Rebuilding my blog after losing the domain turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

I now have a setup I actually enjoy working with, and one that feels way more aligned with how I like to build things.
AI tools helped, but they still need hand-holding—at least for now.

Although I migrated WordPress, I must say that it's still a great and powerful platform, and can be amazing if you manage lots of content with several contributors, and roles.

I'm glad I took the time to rebuild my blog with a modern and simpler stack.

Hopefully it will make me write more.

📚 Resources

Cover image made by me using Dall-E 3.