Remake, Remodel, Reduce.
Welcome to my new website! I have wanted to create a new and updated version of this page for a long time. In fact, I feel that the old one kept me from blogging; I couldn’t stand watching my own webpage anymore.
What you see here is already the fifth version of my blog. I’ve been writing on this page since 2012. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Sadly, writing for this page has stalled in the last two years, with almost no output. This is due to several things:
I’ve written another book on TypeScript. And lots of my TypeScript content went there. I published everything I did in Rust as slides. I have around 1600 slides worth of Rust content in my slides section, which is not discoverable in my regular blog. It was just too much. Last year took a significant toll on me, and I spent most of 2024 recovering and finding balance. My site was way too overblown. There are so many sections and so many different types of content. Sometimes, I wasn’t sure how, where, or what to publish.
All these factors influence this new design. So what’s new?
Remake #
First of all, it’s a fresh, new look. I’m no designer, but I can adjust typography to suit me. Bad typography, line length, line height, and color choices can easily distract me. So I fiddled around to find a font that looks good, reads well, and allows me to focus. With that focus, I removed all potential distractions from every page.
I’ve always treated this website as a blog or even a magazine. If you have a blog or magazine, one of the main expectations is regular content output. I can’t guarantee regular content output, and I don’t want this superficial requirement imposed on me. This website is now a presentation of myself. What do I do? What do I talk about? What do I offer? Fortunately, people and organizations asked for my help as a consultant and trainer, and the main page should represent what I can offer. You find a link to my recent presentations, my recent articles on Rust, and my recent articles on TypeScript. This is the focus I have for the contents of this blog. You will also find information on my latest publications. I keep this page open for changes. The rest is pure content.
Remodel #
I also moved from Vercel to Cloudflare Pages about a year ago. I’ve been using Cloudflare since the beginning because its HTML cache and CDN distribution are fantastic. With Pages, they offer a service that is in every way faster, better, and more reliable than any other intermediate hosting provider. There have been way too many hoops I had to jump through to make image generation work on Vercel. On Pages, it just works. In Austria, we have the saying, “Don’t go to the Schmiedl if you can go to the Schmied,” meaning that if you can go to the real thing, don’t bother with people pretending. Intermediate hosting providers rely on the services of others but lay their abstractions on top of it. I don’t want to work with those abstractions.
Gone is also fettblog.eu, my domain for 12 years! I lost it briefly this summer, a wake-up call to get my domains in order. It’s here again but doesn’t represent what I want to achieve. Fettblog stands for “Front-End Technology Talk.” I don’t talk about front-end that much anymore.
Reduce #
I had so much different content on this site. I got rid of a lot of it. The cinema, top lists, newsletters, Even guides. I got rid of everything. Everything is just plain blog content with a few extra pages. I keep slides since I talk a lot at conferences, and I like hosting my slides for myself since every other slide-hosting service went bonkers over the years.
I loved the ideas of guides, and I keep the navigational structure, but I don’t separate them from my regular articles anymore.
Well. Here’s to number 5! I do expect bugs coming up. I do expect orphan pages lying around somewhere. I will clean that up over the next weeks. Or months. Or years. Or whenever I find something coming up.
I’m eager to write again. Writing helps me getting my mind in order. And I really want to share more writing with you.