Bye, Bye, Old Homepage!

About 20 years ago I created my own homepage at www.the-rickerts.de/mr. I used pretty basic tools like handwritten templates and the m4 macroprocessor to render the HTML. It was fine at the time since homepages were usually displayed on PC screens which had a resolution of 1024x768 or less. Nowadays, you cannot make any assumption about the resolution that is used. So, my old homepage looked really weird on smartphones and wide screens. For example, the background assumed a maximum screen width…

On smartphones, you could not even read the text since it was much too small like looking at the following screen…

And, of course, it really looked HOMEMADE.

So, in comes the new homepage. A colleague of mine hinted me at Jekyll, a feature-rich generator for static homepages. I was quickly convinced that this would be the way to go. Since I’m not good (which is an understatement) at graphical design, I decided to use one the many themes which are available for Jekyll. On jekyllthemes.org I found themes that I liked, but none of them had all the features that I was looking for. In the end, I merged two themes for the new homepage: I used What A Theme as basis for the theme and added the timeline from Agency.

Combining the two themes turned out a little more difficult than I thought. What A Theme is based on the CSS toolbox Bulma whereas Agency uses Bootstrap. Apparently, they do not really co-exist with each other well. I decided to keep Bulma since most of the templates came from What A Theme and just surgically cut out the CSS parts from Bootstrap that I needed for the timeline of Agency. It was kind of a mess, but it works for the time being. If I ever have time to clean up, it would be nice to map the layout requirements of the timeline onto the original CSS classes of Bulma.

Next to my homepage I also had a blog at marcusrickert.blogspot.com:

I used it only sparsely and, frankly, I could not even remember the URL while writing this blog entry. Since Jekyll supports an inline blog, it was only natural to move the blog to my new homepage. Hopefully, this will trigger me more often to write an entry about my hobby. Once I have migrated all the old posts on the old blog I will close it.

So, let’s compare the old and the new homepages: