For the 15th anniversary of this blog, there is not only a redesign, but also new technology under the hood:
- Blogdown makes it possible to create a website based on Hugo with R. So I can design my blog with my favorite language and don’t have to think about how to get my R code or graphics in WordPress every time.
- The output is pure HTML, which on the one hand abolishes the dependency on databases, WordPress plugins etc and on the other hand, and this is extremely important for me, enables super-fast delivery of content (see screenshot of the Google PageSpeed Insights below during the tests with my preview server). I don’t get any more mails because someone tried to break into my server, or because the database server requires too much memory.
- The workflow is almost fully automatic: I write my texts in RStudio, commit a stand on GitHub, and from there it is automatically deployed to my web server. If I fail at something, I just go back to an earlier commit. Continuous deployment is probably what this is called in modern German.
In 2005 I had realized the first version of the blog with Movable Type. At that time, HTML pages were already being produced, which then no longer had to be generated in real time when a page was accessed. I don’t remember when and why I switched to WordPress. Maybe because there were more expansions there. For 10 years I was at least on WordPress and more than once enormously annoyed.
The switch to Hugo was not fully automated. The WordPress to Hugo Exporter was the only one of the popular options that worked halfway for me. It is necessary to have the space that a blog takes up today on the disk and in the DB free again on the disk, because everything is replicated on it as flat files. The error messages that the script spits out are not helpful in identifying this expected error. At the same time, not all pages were converted correctly, so I had to touch almost all pages again.
On the one hand, I noticed what has changed since 2005:
- People and blogs that I miss, it feels like there are hardly any real blogs left,
- Topics that either still interest me today or that I ask myself how they could have interested me at all,
- and lots of links to external sites that are simply dead, even though the sites still exist.
The web is just as little static as we are, and the 15 years are a nice documentation of my different stages for me.