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.