According to https://web.archive.org/, I released my first website on this domain almost ten years ago. Actually I own a website since 2004, the internet archive contains (very funny) material. My first website was a monster, taped together using framesets and handpainted drawings from Phillip Jones. We scanned them using a about 20 kg flatbed scanner. All in a time, in that you were the coolest guy if you were able to design websites using table layouts with Microsoft Frontpage.

I had the idea for a new blog about five years ago. I actually started a frist try to build a new website, but I never finished this project. With this one I made it. I started the development of the concept in the hackerspace Toolbox Bodensee e.V.. It took us about 4 months to get this project done. I would like to thank Phillip Jones at this point. Phillip developed the design and endured my annoying love in the detail without suicide thoughts. A further "thank you" goes to David Blumer, who also helped me out with some images.

Photo The never released design from 2014

I was used to have Frontpage and Frames, now I have PHPStorm and clean html elements. I decided to do the whole project without a serversided scripting language or any cms. Why? I always try to learn new things in private projects and with this project I wanted to generate the final website on my computer. This allows the server to just "passthrough" the file to the client without any processing or generating. In addition to the maximum design freedom of sub pages this will also take the loading time to a whole new level. And of course, you can't find a backdoor in the code ever, since no code is running on your server at all.

I checked a couple of gulp modules that were made to generate static pages. But somehow, none of them satisfied my basic requirements or I quickly hit their limits in more detailed checks. So I wrote everything on my own. Regardless of the sitemap, rss feed or the blog overview, everything is generated from a flat as possible folder structure just by typing an easy gulp build . Every folder contains a small JSON file that describes the page and its visibility.

More than 38 different gulp tasks take care on generating the site, concatenating and minifying of the javascript and css files or the check whether the generated html is valid at all. And of course, I have end to end and unit tests. Even the deployment on to the test and production servers is done automatically. I plan to release some of my gulp scripts in future including a detailed documentation. Until then I'm looking forward to the comments I am curious about who will find all the eastereggs.