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!
I have migrated all my source codes from GitHub to Codeberg.
Codeberg is a community-driven software development platform operated by Codeberg e.V., a non-profit association based in Berlin, Germany. I am a supporting member of this association. The platform is based on Forgejo, a Gitea fork.
Three of my projects remain fully mirrored on GitHub:
You can continue to open issues and pull requests there. All my other projects are now archived on GitHub, and the development takes place on Codeberg.
You can also log in via GitHub and GitLab there, so you should have no problem with continuing to send me bug reports and pull requests. You don’t need a separate account to do this.
I did not make the decision to move to Codeberg lightly. There are two main thoughts that made me do it.
The recent history of the former Twitter platform showed me how fragile a social network can be when it is under the control of a commercial company. I deliberately chose the federated platform Mastodon as my new home because it is not owned and operated by a single company. As a non-profit association, Codeberg is also owned by the community.
I am deeply concerned about the recent events in the US following the inauguration of Donald Trump. Therefore, I want to reduce my dependence on US-based commercial platforms as much as possible. I prefer to act in time rather than having to react when it’s too late.
Image: The Forgejo mascot by David Revoy (CC-BY 4.0)
After being on Twitter for 13 years, I decided that it is time to leave the platform for good. They say you should always leave on a high note. Maybe I have missed that moment already.
Today I have closed my account there. My handle was shred_ (with a trailing underscore).
You can follow me in the Fediverse: @shred@oldbytes.space
Thank you, blue bird! I have learned a lot from you and met a lot of great and interesting people. It was fun while it lasted.
PS: I have no plans to join other social media platforms. No need to send me invite codes. 😉
The shredzone is celebrating its 20th birthday today! 🎂
Actually, my personal homepage is much older. It had started some day around 1995, when I was learning HTML. My first website was just a bunch of hand-made static pages. They were published on the free webspace of my ISP.
In 1998 I recreated my homepage, and called it “shredzone” for the first time. It was still using static pages, but now they were generated by running some scripts on my Amiga (there is a separate article about that if you’re interested). This new site got bigger and bigger, and at some point ran out of quota on my ISP’s webspace.
On April 15th 2000, I moved my site to a professional web hosting provider. I also bought my very first domain shredzone.de on that day. Now, having content and also a dedicated domain, the shredzone was finally complete!
In the coming years, I was switching from Amiga to Linux, and I was learning a lot of JavaScript and PHP. In 2003, I redesigned the website from scratch again. It was now using a self-made Content Management System called Akiko. A cool feature of Akiko was that I could use different seasonal page templates. On Christmas there was snow and a snowman, while on Halloween the pages were decorated with pumpkins and a manga witch that I had drawn myself.
Some years later, blogs were getting popular. I quickly added a blog feature to Akiko, and was learning about writing my own weblog since then. I found out that this format was much more useful for me, much better than the tree-structured contents I had before.
Soon I had reached the limits of Akiko. Writing a new blog article was tedious, especially when pictures were involved, so I badly neglected my blog for a couple of months. It couldn’t go on like that, and I decided to write my own open source blog system from scratch. It is called Cilla and is written in Java now. Just in time for the 10th birthday, it was finally ready for prime time. My new weblog had a sleek and modern design, with a random photo on the top of each page. And it was much easier to use. Some of the old contents were migrated to my new blog, while many other outdated (or embarassing 😅) stuff was just dumped. But still my very first blog record goes back to the beginning of Akiko in 2003.
I liked the new design. However, it was cluttered with all kind of extras that have been modern when the blog scene started (like a calender and a tag cloud). Also, mobile devices have gotten ubiquitous over the years, but the old design was not optimized for them and just looked ugly on a small display.
So, in 2018 there was another major redesign, the one you are seeing now. It still runs on Cilla, but everything unnecessary has been removed, and some other necessary stuff like the comments fell victim to GDPR. On the other hand, it has a responsive design now.
Looking back these 20 years, it was a very interesting time. I have learned a lot about the internet, about websites, programming, and blogging. Now I’m curious what the Shredzone is going to look like in 20 years.
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. 🙂