(Note: This post was published in May 2026, over a year after it was written.)
For more than twenty years I have been self-hosting the Internet services that were consumed by my and my wife’s household as well as by my hobby programming activities: Email, calendars + contacts, version control, bug tracking, and - last but not least - this and a couple of other websites.
Alas, this self-hosting project has now come to an end.
This is just a quick note that all of my software projects that up until now were still hosted on my dedicated server have now been moved to GitHub. These are the affected projects:
15 years ago I migrated this website to the popular CMS Drupal. At first I loved Drupal, it was a nice and shiny tool for managing my content without having to deal with designing the appearance of the site. Over the years, however, I realized that running a dynamic website also has a cost, and that cost is keeping the software that drives the site up-to-date. With Drupal that cost is substantial: Security updates are constantly pouring in, and upgrading Drupal to a major new version invariably also means a major amount of work to be done. The latest upgrade to Drupal 8 in 2018, for instance, took me about two weeks to complete!
After two weeks of work I have more or less completed the upgrade of this website from Drupal 7 (D7) to Drupal 8 (D8). Also part of the package is a new theme (the "Nexus" theme) because the old Drupal core theme "Garland" has not been ported over to D8. I'm not as happy with the new theme as I was with "Garland" (for instance, check out how ugly the "Add new comment" form looks like), but for the most part it's quite OK.
This site is undergoing maintenance: I am in the middle of upgrading from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7, and as you can see for yourself quite a few things do not yet work as they should. Thank you for your patience while I try to get everything back into shape.
Update, 19 June 2012: Most of the site should now work again as before. The former site theme (Sky) unfortunately is no longer available with the same design, so for the moment I'm leaving the site on the core theme, Garland. On the plus side: Comments are now protected again with reCAPTCHA.
Today I was surprised to notice that some blog entries on this website have received a couple of comments. On closer inspection, though, it turned out that the comments were merely comment spam. It is a mystery how the spambot responsible for the comments managed to circumvent my CAPTCHA system, but I guess I should have known that it would happen eventually. After all, the spam bastards of this world are wildly determined to destroy the fun and usefulness of everything, including this little, insignificant website :-(
Comments are now enabled on the entire site. To ward off spam bots, anonymous visitors (i.e. guests that are not logged in) must enter a CAPTCHA, though. The CAPTCHA system is currently set to display ASCII art (which is fun :-), but this will probably change in the future.
This afternoon I have been busy whipping up a topic hierarchy and tagging all the old stories and articles on this website. Hopefully I will also find the time to add some nice icons.
I recently upgraded my site to Drupal 6. Unfortunately, I had to abandon my beloved Aqua theme in the process because nobody had ever bothered to rewrite the theme for Drupal 6, and I had not an inkling of how to do it myself.
For the moment, the Sky theme serves as a replacement. Let's see how it stands the trial period...
Since I never really got around to keep those "Curriculum Vitae" pages up-to-date, I finally got rid of them. Instead, I added an About page.
