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A few weeks ago, my website was hacked. At first, I was shocked, but I received a “friendly” email from the hackers who explained that they would refrain from destroying my site’s reputation for a small fee of $3000 in bitcoins. However, I wasn’t able to visit my site or use a WordPress login. The hackers didn’t know that I hadn’t updated my website for twelve years, and my plugins and WordPress versions were outdated. I had a lot of work and projects without the website, and I didn’t think it was necessary to have a website or portfolio online. I also didn’t want to pay the ransom, so I decided to DELETE the whole site and start from scratch.

There was a lot of work to do, especially with illustrations and my blog texts, but it felt good to be in charge again. I realized how intuitive and easy WordPress is. The developers did a great job. I’m grateful to the hackers in a strange way, as they gave me additional motivation and inspiration to make this update. Without the hack, I may have never found the time to make these changes.

Not everything bad that we experience in our daily routine is inevitably bad by default. Some bad things can inspire us to make changes that we should have done a long time ago.