Restructuring of my personal websites and blogs

After some years with the old websites and blogs several issues arised. For my personal content I had basically two sites:

• idev.ch – Hosted my old tech blog as well as some aged software I wrote many years ago.
• marcduerst.com – Site hosts my diving- and photoblog.

They both where built using Drupal 7 and hosted on a local hoster.

The issues I had with them:

• Security updates of Drupal and – even worst – ever plugin I used to build the sites. I could have installed security updates nearly every week if I wish.
• idev.ch isn’t really the name I like to promote my tech blogs. It’s the label the existing users of the old software now.
• I like to start over again with my personal tech blog and hopefully keep the drive longer then before and update it more regularly.
• Adding posts to the tech blog was way to complicate. I like to spend time on the content; not the the tech behind the blog.

Other goals and requirements:

• Minimize time spent on technical blog-maintenance but don’t get lazy on security.
• Keep tech blog separated from my dive & photo blog.
• Keep up to date with state of the art blogging features. Eg. syndicate, share, monitor/stats, editing
• Use a abstract syntax to write technical blog-posts. Markdown would be nice.
• Have syntax-highlighting for code-blocks and inline-code.
• Use the domain marcduerst.com for my primary personal stuff.
• Keep the domain idev.ch for the old software.
• Increase priority of tech topics over the dive & photo topics.
• Keep dive & photo blog and also update it the future.

Platform evaluation

The main alternatives I came up regarding the tech blog platform where:

• Install a software with easier/automated maintanance then my custom Drupal and host the site on my local hoster.
• Write my own blog software as an exercise for the new ASP.Net Core platform and Azure Websites.
• Use Jekyll software to generate static website based on a GIT repository and it on local hoster or on GitHub pages.
• Use a cloud hosted SaaS like wordpress.com.

Each has its pros and cons.

Install a better updateable software may be a minor improvement and needs time to learn and build it.

Write my own needs a lot of time and blogs are not the best learning example anyway. Furthermore I have to implement all current and upcoming features myself so I again spend a lot of time for tech instead content.

Jekyll static site generator based on GitHub is geeky but also has quite a learning curve and needs time to build. New blog features in the future may be built myself.

SaaS (WordPress.com etc) limit to what that platform actually can.

Decision

After I tried all of them I decided go with SaaS as I am set up quickly and has a good and up-to-date featureset for blogging. Furthermore I most not spend any time over the next years to keep the platform running.

Action plan

Based on the above decision and requirements I came up with the following action plan.

• Set up a WordPress.com blog => done
• Move the existing content from marcduerst.con over to tauchfotos.ch => done
• Point marcduerst.com to the new WordPress blog => done
• Rebuild idev.ch as a static HTML page just used for the old software I wrote
• Maybe set up an additional WordPress blog for the dive & photo content over at tauchfotos.ch. Not yet sure about this.

As you see my action plan makes pretty good progress but there is still work left.