A new website

This new website deserves some words of introduction about how this all came about and the reason behind it. This is, in fact, my second attempt at giving my personal photography a home on the web. In essence, it's meant to show what I am doing in photography, to display photographs, share some thoughts, and probably post the occasional bit about film cameras or the process of film photography. Some people might call this a portfolio, which to me sounds like I would pursue this professionally. Rather, for me this webpage should show how my art develops over time.

A look back: In early 2025 I had set up a site on the platform Micro.blog, picked out a theme and customized it a little, and eventually published a few posts over the course of 2025. Micro.blog is a blogging platform built technically on Hugo, as well as a likeable community within the so-called Fediverse. It positions itself somewhere between Mastodon and Tumblr. In terms of content, it comes essentially from the short-form thinking of Twitter, but it also allows multifaceted and extensive posts and, ultimately, almost entirely free-form websites. This leads to a diverse and varied community and range of websites based on Micro.blog.

I never much warmed to Micro.blog, neither as a community nor as a technical foundation for my website. I personally found it hard to find content in the community that interested or excited me in a lasting way. On top of that, over the last two years I've also considerably reduced how much short-form social media content I consume. So my interest in content on the platform already faded within the first weeks of my membership. Beyond that, it was simply not feasible for me to design the website the way I envisioned it visually as well as in terms of content structure. Technically, the stack at Micro.blog is layered: Hugo at the base, then the platform's modifications, next the theme, and finally personal adjustments on top. The more you want to depart from the default, the more this complexity bites. Everything seems to be possible, but I could never get close to what I had in mind. That frustrated me about my webpage at Micro.blog.

Over the past months I thought more and more about how I could build it differently and what technical steps I would need to take for that. But since the documentation consists almost exclusively of pinned posts in a Discourse installation (a kind of forum), I lacked the foundation to work my way in methodically, and I was … lost.

This may sound like one but it honestly isn't meant as a sweeping criticism of Micro.blog. I remain convinced that, by and large, it's a great platform, and I certainly wish the people behind it all the best and continued success. That said, I have to note that better-structured and therefore more easily accessible documentation would make getting started considerably easier for a lot of people. 😉

Over the past year I kept looking for alternatives. For a long time I mostly thought about running my own Hugo instance. However, I couldn't find a theme that went even roughly in the direction of what I imagined for my website. Further, I didn't trust myself to develop something like that entirely from scratch. Customizations are one thing, but building everything up from the very ground involved too many decisions that I couldn't get a handle on. Eventually I came across Ghost (once again) and discovered that there are a some themes from the Ghost team itself. One of them is now the technical foundation of this new site, since I like it and it feels like a perfect fit for my purpose.

My experience with web hosting over the last twenty years – both privately and professionally – certainly helped me a lot, but I have to say that Ghost is also a well-thought-out platform. The documentation is extensive, well structured, and easily accessible – even if the parts specifically about hosting are currently a bit bumpy. The system itself is impressively tidy, and you can understand the backend within minutes. The editor for actually managing content, in particular, is a fascinating and very convincing experience.

My experiences with WordPress had made me critical of content management systems ("CMS") in general, and I feared I'd see something similar, but it's simply no comparison. Ghost doesn't even try to be an alternative to or a direct competitor of WordPress or other “real” CMSes. It aims to be an open-source blogging and newsletter platform, and in my view the software succeeds at that very convincingly. The software sets clear boundaries on what it wants to and can do. Since my requirements (for now) stay within those boundaries without much friction, it seem Ghost and I get along nicely.

The customizations I made were each done in minutes. There were just more and more of them over the course of the build, so I did end up spending a few days on putting it together. It was simply so much fun to tinker with the details, to realize my ideas on the site, and then to actually be able to see them come to life relatively quickly. Adding content, too, is so easy and so full of design possibilities that, for the first time, I genuinely enjoy it and feel motivated to keep building out and expanding the site or to shape it more according to my personal wishes.

Now the new site is up and goes live with this post. I'm very proud and look forward to presenting more content here in the future, but above all my photography. I'd be glad if you'd like to follow along.

PS: The easiest way to follow is via one of the feeds (RSS).