Some days ago this blog turned 20 years old. In the first 10 years I changed it frequently. The theme changed, the blogging engine changed and the code changed quite a bit during that time as I gained more experience with HTML and CSS. You can read all about that in the 10th anniversary post.

In the last 10 years the theme hasn’t changed as much and as often as in the first 10 years. The colors only got adjusted a bit and it got dark mode support and the buttons at the top were replaced by simple icons.

Shortly after the post about the 10th anniversary, I changed back again to static publishing. At first with Octopress and finally after updating to Octopress 3 and moving on to using Jekyll directly I ended up with Hugo. With the change to Octopress, Jekyll and Hugo, I have no longer a blogging web application on my server. The website is generated on my computer at home and then uploaded to the server. There is no blogging web application any more needing frequent updates to prevent security issues. As I’m not into live blogging and my blogging frequency is rather low, this setup is perfect for me.

GDPR was a challenge when it was introduced. I already had a somewhat wordy privacy policy and with GDPR it would need to become even longer. This is mainly a private blog. Sometimes I write about the apps I create. That is the only commercial usage. I decided that I wanted to have a simple privacy policy and changed it to

This website does not collect any personal data.

I think it’s fun when you compare it to the long texts you usually see on websites. And it’s true. There is no tracking here. There are no external resources and no social network buttons that notify their networks each time someone visits a page here. I dislike trackers and decided that I really don’t need the insights they generate.

Another bigger change was the restructuring which resulted in the creations section. Before I have been using subdomains or separate domains for my apps and other things I created. Now I can use this section as a kind of portfolio of the things I created.

In some years I write a blog post nearly every month and then there are years like this one when a blog post in June is the first one of the year. I highly recommend using the atom feed or json feed if you don’t want to miss my infrequent posts.

I’m looking forward to the next 10 years. Will it still be HTML and CSS then? We’ll see.