So it begins
I was struggling to get a personal website up and running for almost 15 years now. It's crazy how I let myself be lured to the common social media silos, knowing that I could do so much more and better with the content I wanted to share with my friends, my colleagues or the endless void of the web. But, convenience, you know.
And yet, here we are
Over the Christmas holidays 2025 I was finally able to do more than to download Eleventy, move bits around only to be distracted by something else and leave it be. Before Eleventy there was GitHub Pages and before that there was Tumblr and before that and so on and suddenly I end up thinking of MySpace and how I learned to write basic HTML and CSS because I wanted to change the background of „my personal space“ on the web.
Thanks to Eleventy (<3 Zach) and (currently) Netlify I now own a little space on the web. I'm on a free plan and do not 100% own my stuff but the idea is to get there at some point. Money being a limiting factor but I don't want to start blogging by whining.
Why Eleventy you ask?
I have to admit, of all the content management systems out there (and I've used a lot of them over the course of my career) the only one I could live with using for myself would be Kirby by Bastian Allgeier. And yet, I thought, why use a CMS in the first place, when all I want to serve is HTML, CSS and some sparkles of JavaScript to make it accessible?
Of all the static site generators out there, Eleventy sticks out to me – mainly because I know Zach from interacting with him on the web and meeting him once at a conference, which resulted in me thinking: „Yeah! Cool guy."
From all I know, Eleventy is fast, reliable, maintained, flexible and community driven – all the good things, y'know. I like those good things a lot.
Flexibility is great
I also like it because I can choose my own adventure. Markdown with frontmatter plus Nunjucks feels like home to me while others might want to go with Twig or JSON or YAML or whatever it is you like. One can build their own architecture. I can be as tidy or chaotic as I want to be, as long as I know what I'm doing (I hope I know).
Most importantly, I did not have to get rid of loads of code in order to write my own the way I want it to look like. I am nitpicky, stubborn and sceptical. I keep poking at things until they look right – to me. While I'm trusting my instincts most of the time I also tend to verify a lot. All that combined makes me pedantic at times, I guess, but I dance away from the subject. The freedom to do things my way! That's it!
Why Netlify you ask?
Infrastructure. Not having to do things myself. Again, convenience, eh?!
Thing is, I don't know how to setup a server of my own (yet?). I know how I'd like it to be, but to get there – I'd have to ask for help. I'd also have to take a certain sum of money into my hands, which I don't have (no whining, just a fact). Netlify has a free plan and connecting it with my GitHub repository for continuous deployment and having Eleventy supported with builds and all that noise – marvelous! The ease! I love it. Maybe the next step will be to throw some money at netlify in order to have a custom domain.
What can you expect from this blog?
I guess that's the question, isn't it? I currently don't know yet and I actually refuse to think about it for more than a minute because it does my head in.
In my mind I see this lean, clean, structured tool I've put together (the behind the curtain stuff) in order to put out all the things in a not so much structured way: thoughts, music I found worthy of sharing, a picture I took, code examples, ideas to share and discuss, opinions (everyone has them, right) – I just told my wife that if she was into it, I could create room for her thoughts as well to which she replied: „Who would be interested in what I'm thinking?“
An all too familiar way of thinking
That sentence is another hurdle I had to take in order to do what I'm doing right now. I read so many blogs from 2005ish onwards until Faceplace and that chirpy spot (which became terrible all of a sudden and should be abandoned and left to rot, in my opinion) took over. I read so many opinions, great minds putting great thoughts out there, sharing findings, sharing ideas, sharing that sparkle which pushed my career as a web developer and me personally (I hope) to a much better place. I thought I wasn't capable of doing that until I did. I posted on Smashing Magazine about what I did when I was working there. Years later I posted on 24a11y.com about the way I use SVG icons in an accessible fashion. Both times it felt great to put my stuff out there, but the spark didn't start the fire.
I hope this time things will be different.
The way of the IndieWeb Warrior
I will post here first and then syndicate elsewhere.
Ideally I will be able to use webmentions. I tried to integrate them and I guess we'll find out whether they are working or not.
Ideally I will be able to post here and Mastodon will receive the headline and a short description with a link back to the article automatically. We'll find out about that too.
The Web I'd love to see again
I like my world wide web focused on people – not on companies. I can't stand the fact that we lost the fight for a personal web. The web I got to know was personal, it was everyone on their own site but connected, together, through comment sections, through diary-like posts, through a lovely chaos which got put aside for a „corporate web“. For ads, for revenue, for turning everyone and their mother into marketing managers of their own being. I hate that. I really can't stand the fact that we let companies and big tech turn us into recurring income for them.
I saw a lot of potential in those social media sites when they showed up but the way it turned out there is little benefit apart from trying very hard to stay connected against the algorithm trying to shove paid posts and ads down our throats in order to keep us scrolling.
One last thing
If I had three wishes for 2026 they would be this:
- Let's get rid of fascism
- Let's stick to facts again
- A bag of salted and roasted peanuts
This isn't my idea, but that of "Hör auf das kritzelt". A german comic artist I love. Their post with that comic is only on social media and only available in German: