Welcome to weblog v6

So here we are again – I can’t count how many weblogs I’ve created since my first one back in 1999. I had a weblog called “I’m not the asian nurse!” for quite a while and it had over 500.000 hits in total.

v1

Weblog number one was using Blogger. Back then there were basically two options: Blogger and weblogs.com. I went with the first because it was quite intuitive and easy to setup. At some point Blogger became quite limited in what it offered and weblogs started to look all too similar. I decided to roll my own CMS, as this is the natural choice for any developer.

v2 aka "I'm not the Asian Nurse!"

Probably the funniest weblog I had and for sure the most fun time I had blogging. Topics covered were mostly nerd stuff like games or light nsfw content. The new version was based on PHP & MySQL and had features few weblogs had at that time, like ranks, scores, custom user colors, and a random text replace function that turned all too polite user comments into much more ranting ones. Yes. It was a time when I had to spice up user comments, not tone them down. Feels like 20 years ago. Oh wait...

Eventually my posting frequency became longer and longer and I felt more and more pressure to come up with posts to keep the crowd entertained. All of a sudden six months passed without any updates and this market the end of that era.

v3

About three years ago I started an attempt to convert my single page version of my retro computing site www.awsm.de to wordpress so that I could write articles again. It was a short lived project, I couldn't figure out how to combine the ease of blogging with the full control over the website content (since I'm integrating lots of JavaScript stuff for example). Almost right after I converted everything to Wordpress I stopped using it. Poor thing.

v4

Another wordpress weblog and the predecessor of this blog at https://www.hinterding.com. In fact, some of the articles on this page have been migrated from the previous version. I enjoy writing again a lot, but I couldn't really put my finger on why I had doubts about the right kind of content for that site.

Well, the answer to that is quite trivial. Back when I had my first weblog, there was almost no difference between the real life me and the digital me. I was a student and did not write about my job, my career or anything like that. It was just mindless fun, shits and giggles.

So the decision was made to have a dedicated blog for both my hobbies (www.awsm.de) and my work life (https://www.hinterding.com).

v5

My hobby weblog at www.awsm.de which is based on the same setup as this site.

v6

So here we are and I'm super happy with the new setup. The whole page is now a static site and uses 11ty (Eleventy), which is a static site generator. No database, no queries, no CMS at all, just plain markdown.

The site ist hosted on Github and gets automatically deployed with Netlify when I push to the main repo. This is the best possible solution for me, as I now can

• style every page as I like (but have the convenience of templates)
• integrate whatever code I want without dealing with weird content editors
• write articles right from the code editor, which I'm very confortable with
• publish a new article just by commiting to Github, with automatic deployment

There's quite a bit left to do though. Right now I haven't implemented any options for readers to comment. I have to dig more into my options. And since I have basically created the page from scratch without any starting templates, it is not as responsible as I would like it. The navigation at the top is an example. But all that can be fixed and it is great to have full control over the content again. This is very exciting for me.

Thank you for accompaning me on that journey!