Look what I have found... This is my very first shredzone, as it was online from 1998 to 2003. First it was hosted by my internet provider. Then, on April 15th 2000, I registered my own domain – shredzone.de – and moved my site to a professional hoster.

The site did not use a fancy content mangagement system, but consisted only of static HTML pages. It was built on my Amiga using a preprocessor called HSC, an acronym for HTML Sucks Completely. 😜 Some parts like the gallery or the download area were generated by accompanying ARexx scripts. It was incredibly easy to add content to the site. Basically it was just adding or changing a file, and then invoking smake to rebuild the affected parts of the site within seconds, including the navigation. It was a big advantage that I was going to miss badly later.

At that time I did not use CVS yet, so sadly all the past versions and changes have been lost. The only version I still have is the final one on my Amiga harddisk. I have found the project today, by a rather lucky accident. It was only the source code though, the final compiled version has got lost over the years. There is a Linux port of HSC, so basically I could rebuild the site on my Linux machine. But the ARexx parts require an Amiga environment, and porting them to Linux would have consumed too much time.

So I started an Amiga emulator and, thanks to the good shape of the project that the past Amiga me has left the present Linux me, I actually only needed to run smake to rebuild the entire homepage in just 3 minutes.

The requirement to run on an Amiga, was what later broke the neck of this homepage. When the Amiga platform died, I moved on to Linux, but I could not move my homepage with me. So, in 2003, I replaced it with a self-made content management system that was written in PHP and was called Akiko. It had some nice features, but on the other hand it was rather tedious to add new content. Because of that, I badly neglected my homepage in those years.

In 2010, Akiko was replaced by a self-made blog system that is written in Java and is named Cilla. Even after a major redesign in 2018, it is still in use today. 🙂