26 years ago today, the Shredzone went online! 🥳

I am celebrating this somewhat odd birthday with a major redesign of my website.

This is not the first redesign. It started in 2000 with a static website that was generated on an Amiga. In 2003, I switched my website over to a custom-written PHP Content Management System called Akiko, which was later expanded with a blog. The last redesign took place 16 years ago when I migrated the blog to Cilla, a piece of self-made blog software developed in Java. With this foundation, my homepage ran reliably ever since and even survived various server moves. However, this solution also required a lot of memory on the server.

The new Shredzone uses Hugo and is now completely static again. No database, no bloated web application, just finished files on the web server. This is most noticeable in the fact that the individual pages now load noticeably faster.

Nevertheless, all the content has been migrated; even the oldest blog article from 2003 is still there.

Even better: The old Shredzone wasn’t really multilingual. From now on, most articles will be published in German and English. A great many older articles, which only existed in one language, are already available bilingually.

Another new feature is that there is finally an eye-friendly Dark Mode.

There are still a few works in progress that I will tackle over the next few weeks:

• The translation of a few German articles into English was done by machine. The result still sounds a bit clunky. I will gradually revise all machine-translated articles.
• The ability to search pages is currently completely missing. Unfortunately, this is difficult to solve on static websites, but not impossible. I am working on it, but it will take a while.
• The old RSS feeds no longer exist. I still have to check the new ones until they work too. If you subscribed to the previous RSS feeds, you will unfortunately have to do it again.
• The old Shredzone also worked as an app on a smartphone. That should still work, although I haven’t had time for extensive testing yet.
• The hashtags were carried over from the old content, but I will revise and expand them.
• There will still be minor changes to the layout here and there.
• And quite certainly, one or two bugs have hidden themselves deep in the system.

Anyway: The new Shredzone is online. Have fun browsing!