Inauguration

March 22nd, 2010

So this will be the first entry in my new blog. After more than two years, I have a functioning website again, this time even with really nice content. The visit should be worthwhile.

Are there any traditions for the first blog entry? Like when you christen a ship, for example? At the moment I don't feel very festive. I don't really need to introduce myself, that's what the big “About me” button is for. So then maybe I'll let you know some meta info, even at the risk of being not so exciting for non-programmers:

• This page is written in XHTML, JavaScript, PHP and MySQL.
• The libraries used are Smarty and jQuery. I'm using them both for the first time and am very satisfied.
• Apart from that there are several smaller plugins: Markdown, PHP OpenID and probably a few more that I can't think of right now.
• The software is otherwise complete homegrown. My motivation for this is to escape the update mill. Before this I had a Drupal site, but the constant version updates got on my nerves – and you have to keep updating because there are always security holes. I hope that this software is small enough that it doesn't offer a significant attack surface.

By the way, this website is bilingual. If you have an English browser, you will see it in English. Only all the downloads are in German, but that's only because I have little motivation to translate a dozen PDF files. The technology would be there. Small easter egg: You can also force the language by appending “/de” or “/en” to the URL. By the way, there are only these two languages.

If I haven't missed anything, this website should work in all combinations of CSS/JavaScript turned on/off. Of course it will look different, but everything important should be there. If you have CSS on, you get a pretty layout, and if you have JavaScript on, you get a little more eye candy and some extra content like an email button.

Good luck with this new website then!