Hello, you cruel online world!

Beginnings in the 80s...

My first contacts to remote servers were with the screen text (BTX) of the German Telekom (horrible!). I've really been online since the end of the 90s of the last century, i.e. since the early days of the internet. First with various analogue modems (9,600 baud, 19,200 baud via Zyxel, later 28,800 baud). The data whizzed over the normal telephone line to the mailboxes (e.g. "Tower of Shadows") and into the Fido network (Finlandia). Later there was ISDN and I had one of the first leased lines - for 800 DM per month (64 kBit up/downstream). Even later came the first DSL leased lines (128 kBit upstream and 768 kBit downstream) - free travel and full throttle on the German data highway! I first got to know the Internet at the University of Bremen (computer science course). Back then, I logged on to other computers via Telnet, downloaded files via FTP or even rummaged around in sorted archives with Gopher.

At some point I had my own .de domain and made my first (creepy, hand-coded in HTML) homepage:

Over the years... no, it's been decades now - I have built websites for various projects, but all of them are no longer active due to lack of time and thus lack of content. These include mpcc.de (for the SETI@home project), slowcomputing.de (old workstation & server), digischutz.de (tests of security software I did for Data Becker for more than ten years), textnutte.de (that's how you sometimes feel as an author) or fpv-drohnen.de (should become a niche site). I no longer have most of these domains.

The SETI@home screensaver from 1999, which was running on a Sun SPARCstation 10, among other things...

Since I was one of the first authors in Germany to write about Bitcoin, I also ran a news ticker with tips on Bitcoin for a while (BitcoinNews.org... this site will be revived soon!).

Tools drive me crazy

I have tried all kinds of web servers, HTML editors, content management systems (CMS) like Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress, and dozens of others - and was always annoyed by the user-friendliness and insecurity of the respective software.

The way out was to have my own web server under OpenBSD with its minimal httpd and handmade HTML pages. This was secure, extremely time-consuming and above all ugly... not really presentable. For duinocoin.de, I installed Wordpress again after many years - maybe it's better now?

Wordpress sucks... as usual

Wordpress eventually stops running essential plugins and the visuals (thumbnails here) crumble...aaargl§$"$&/$/!

It's 18 January 2022 and I've taken another look at Wordpress. And it confirms my suspicions: it's gotten even fatter - and much worse: plugins like "count per day" don't run anymore, my PRiNZ Brandford Magazine or Outspoken don't exist anymore, and the MH Magazine I bought in 2015 and paid for the license again in 2016 for the update... and I'm definitely not paying for it a third time. But I would have to, because a lot has changed and the old version has its problems with the new Wordpress. All in all: only problems, costs and frustration!

"Back to the roots: Static Site Generator

So, ruefully - but secretly also joyfully - I return to the Static Site Generator (SSG) "Hugo ". Small, powerful, fast! Actually, only the BashBlog (bb) is even better. By the way, I once wrote a guidebook on this at Heise+ (attention, paywall).

When installing Hugo under Devuan GNU/Linux 4.0 "Chimeara", which has been freed from systemd, there is a small problem, but this is due to the implementation of Hugo and not to Devuan: Since version 0.91.0 there is a new security policy [https://gohugo.io/about/security-model/] which, among other things, prevents the start of external software - in principle a good thing. Unfortunately, I find reStructuredText (.rst; yes, that's exactly how it's spelled!) a bit better than the simpler Markdown (.md). If you start the Hugo server with

hugo server -D --disableFastRender

and create an .rst file, you get the following error message:

Change detected, rebuilding site.
2022-01-18 20:37:01.424 +0100
Source changed "/home/mipl/ssg/hugo/experiment4/content/posts/hello-world.rst": WRITE
rst2html / rst2html.py not found in $PATH: Please install.
                  Leaving reStructuredText content unrendered.
Total in 12 ms

The required "docutils" can be installed under Devuan via

apt-get install python3-docutils

To write reStructuredText you can use any ASCII editor, especially ReText, which is available as version 7.2.1.3 in Devuan.

ReText is a very simple but practical open source editor for ReStructuredText.

Let's go!?

And off we go, the first articles/postings are created. But wait, there are still a few little things:

• Hugo can create multilingual websites. So I could publish content in German, English, Swedish and maybe Spanish and French. The reader could easily switch between the language versions with one click. Sounds exciting, but it's a bit time-consuming to maintain... and the appropriate domains are already taken: The official Duinocoin project can be reached at duinocoin[.com|.net|.org]. That leaves me with duinocoin.de... and so it will (for the time being?) be a purely German-language website. English content will be available on my bitcoinnews.org site.
• Since I live from writing, I logically take a look at monetisation (what an ugly word!). That means: since I get distributions from VGWort for my articles in print media and on Heise-Online anyway, I will integrate the tracking pixels here in Hugo as well. I have already worked with Google AdSense and Amazon Affiliate - and was very disappointed. Readers lose their privacy and get annoyed by ads, I get a few tiny crumbs and Google and Amazon make a golden ass. Let's see what I do there, I will definitely keep this transparent here on this website and publish a possible success every now and then - from this the reader can maybe take something for own projects. I don't have any experience with Patreon, PayPal donations or accompanying YouTube videos yet, but that can change quickly...
• Parallel to this website, there will also be an article at Heise+. Two construction sites mean three times the work! :D
• The Duinocoin project is missing a working MicroPython miner. I have programmed one for ESP8266/ESP32/Pico/BBC:micro and will release the software freely and under the MIT licence here (and on Github).
• There are two more projects planned for the Duinocoin. More about that later! ;)

So, where do I stand now? Well, with this website and the manageable Duinocoin project, I am collecting experiences that I will publish here at irregular intervals under the tag "Hugo". I hope that some useful information will fall out for the reader. Have fun!