A new home page
For many, many years, I had an extremely simple personal website (above). Its early content was handcrafted in static HTML pages and used little styling (CSS was not available early on, and later, I did not learn much about how to use it). For many, many years, I had an extremely simple personal website (above). Its early content was handcrafted in static HTML pages and used little styling (CSS was not available early on, and later, I did not learn much about how to use it).
Over the years, I wanted to share some more elaborate things, but a lack of time and knowledge prevented me from doing so in a nice, consistent manner. I usually created small, stand-alone directories and made sure some text on my home page linked to them so search engines could index the content.
An exception came at the point where I wanted to host a bunch of photo galleries. I had done this in a very simple way earlier using JavaScript, but that approach was not sustainable. I opted to use a PHP-based product called “Gallery” (currently using version 3.x).
Since my hosting provider supported PHP, this also enabled integration with some products that display live weather data from my home weather sensors. These, too, were generally PHP-based and placed in subdirectories.
I also started dabbling in blogging, initially just some tech topics. I had no good way to do that and maintain a consistent format, so I ended up using a blogging platform called “Blogger.com”, now managed by Google. For a number of years and forgot about blogging, partially because I found it too cumbersome. When I looked at my posts recently, their formatting was all messed up, probably as a result of platform changes that required content changes, and I was never keeping up with that.
Travel brought me back to blogging
Our family took a 3-week trip to Japan in 2025, and many people asked about our experiences and for advice. I figured a website might be useful. It would also provide a venue for publishing many of our photos, so we could all look back on the trip and what we did. So, I set out to find a platform to do this.
In the past, I had dabbled in WordPress and similar CMS systems, but I found them somewhat complicated to use and maintain for such a simple purpose. I had also heard of static site generators, and Jekyll in particular had caught my eye in the past. I had never found a good excuse and time to experiment with it, so now became the time.
I also decided that I wanted consistent styling from a template and found the “minimal-mistakes” theme, and so the blog was started, strictly focusing on the Japan trip. It got out of hand because I found myself documenting much more than I anticipated, but I suppose I had now overcome my resistance to blogging. As I produced more content, I found the theme somewhat lacking and adopted the “Chirpy” theme.
To avoid completely changing the setup and content of the travel blog, I decided to also create a personal blog and started it as a separate project, using the Chirpy theme. As I went along, I decided I liked it much better and converted the travel site as well.
What to do with the (old) original site?
As things started to look like it was going to work out, I had to decide what to do with the old site structure and setup. I did not want to remove content, but I did not necessarily care about changing the structure. I could always configure the site to recognize old or ancient url’s and redirect anybody’s browser to the equivalent new location.
Some of the small subdirectory sites were important enough to me that I decided to take their original content and incorporate it into the new blog site. Their subdirectories could then disappear, and redirects would handle ghosts from the past. For some others, such as Photos and Weather-related stuff, this was not feasible, but I decided to move them all under a single directory, for easier management, and again uses redirects to handle the past.
As I mentioned, the old blog.starreveld.com site was kind of non functional. I was able to rescue all six or so posts, and incorporate them into the new blog. What remained was the change the domain to the same server as starreveld.com (instead of to google.com), and configure my hosting setup to then redirect that sub-domain to the main domain, where the home page is the blog. Presto!
New site launch
So tonight was the night. I prepared the blogging-based site and placed it under a “blog” directory. I edited the rewrite rules as mentioned, including redirecting the URL for the now “old” main page to the blog’s new page. Tested all the redirects I planned to support, and now it is official.
The upshot of all this is that the new site, including the travel section, is statically generated from Markdown files. That means there is nothing else needed than the server simply sending down the right files. Jekyll handles formatting (along with the theme) and styling, and warns me about broken links. This makes the site quite efficient and makes my largely independent from any particular hosting provider (although I have been with the same one for years).
I’ll write more about the technical side of all this in future posts.