New Year New Website
Some changes are happening early this year. As I was tired of looking at my old website built with the Yellow CMS and having only limited design choices available, I started shortly after New Year's Day on my new 2026 website design for aboutgrau.com.
The new design is now based on the Grav CMS as a backend. The Grav CMS is much more popular and widespread than the old Yellow CMS and there are much more online resources available. You might say that a completely new website in 2026 should be based on the Ghost CMS but I've decided against Ghost as it seamed rather complicated to me, harder to maintain and equipped with features that I wouldn't use anyway. Instead I've settled on the Grav CMS and again went with an already existing design called Saturn Site skeleton by Afnizar Nur Ghifari and tweaked it until I was happy with the result. I can be rather picky about those little details.
Both the Yellow CMS as well as the new Grav CMS are so called Flat File CMS. They are solely based on Markdown text files and some PHP magic in the background. They are relatively easy to setup and maintain as all you have to do is use an FTP client and upload all the contents of your CMS in a directory on your webhost. There are no complicated databases, no MySQL and not so much overhang. Wordpress is the literal antidote here. But most importantly it's a setup that I can still understand and maintain by myself without needing professional help or any advanced coding knowledge. In that regard I want to be as independent and as self sufficient as possible. Yes, independence is just an idea, a concept that often does not have much to do with reality. But at least in some areas of my life I prefer simplicity and control over fanciness and complexity.
And compared to my old website this new design feels already rather fancy to me, almost too fancy to be honest. It's now a bit more modern and has a bit more eye candy than my pretty robust old approach had. There's quite a lot of whitespace and pleasing font choices to calm down all the busyness of the content. That said, I'd still prefer some solution that's even more minimal, a solution "without any design" whatsoever but often such solutions are hard to find and often come with other compromises and caveats that are hard to go along with.
One additional thing that should work now is a new RSS Feed that you can now subscribe to and follow my news that way. I won't promise that I will try to produce more content this year than in the past few years, but hey, 2026 has only started and I already have a new website design ready!
On the other hand I decided against mantaining and publishing a "Now" page again. The updates to such a page were way too infrequent and I always felt guilty of not keeping it up to date. I've decided that my posts on Mastodon and Bluesky are enough for now.
At this point I'm rather happy with the choices I've made this year and I'm curious to know what you think. Do you like the new design? Does it work for you? Does it serve the content? What's missing? Let me know what you think, all my contact information remains the same.