Every five to six years I'm revamping my website. This is now the 4th major incarnation.
I created my first website somewhere in the 1990s – back then handcoded with HTML. I vaguely remember that it looked better than many others due my use of Bitstream's TrueDoc Technology.
In 1999, I started my blog. It was a custom development based on the web framework Spyce, something like PHP using Python. To create a new article, I just copied a new file to a dedicated directory and it appeared after reloading the page.
Some years later facilities like HTML-based live editing and a proper management interface teased me into migrating the site to Wordpress. Apart from adding content and switching themes once and then, nothing groundbreaking happened though.
The longer I had used Wordpress the more I felt uneasy about the "lack of control". I missed maintaining my site with a revision control system. I also fell in love with Markdown as a more agnostic and future-proof way to format articles. And – last but not least – to be honest, I feel that a site that only changes about once a month does not need to be dynamically generated.
So I made the decision to get rid of Wordpress and come back to something way more simple. In the meantime, a lot of static site generator (SSG) projects have appeared and so I had a wealth of projects to choose from. Due to my unstoppable love for Python, I chose Lektor.
Although automatic export and import facilities are available, I decided to more or less rewrite the site, thus I did not integrate the older articles yet. I really plan to do this though. Until then you can get to the old site via archive.vanille.de.