The crowbyte revival

I. Am. Back.

This is the crowbyte revival. Besides the brand new design there are lot more changes under the hood. If you are curious what, then ...

crowbyte is finally back

I know it has been a long time - a really very long long time - that my blog saw love and dedication from me. Sorry, my dear blog and sorry dear reader.

No promises about more content this time, which I might not be able to keep up to. So more time to focus on what has changed under the hood of crowbyte and about me as the author of this blog.

New website, new CMS

Well, yes, with the new design I once again changed the underlying CMS, too.

I migrated all articles and pages from October CMS to Grav CMS. This time it was no such a big deal. A small script was all I needed to extract every important page and blog article from the database and write each of them into nice little markdown text files which are properly handled by Grav CMS.

While moving the website I really fell in love with the power and simplicity that Grav offers. I already liked October CMS a lot, but Grav CMS has some very big advantages that are so much more close to what I always intended for me as a website engine.

Some details on Grav CMS

Grav CMS is a flat file CMS, so no database anymore. It operates on config files and markdown files for the site contents. This is neat, simple, easy and extremely comfortable as soon as you get used to Grav and how it works.

If you are using the Admin Panel as a Plugin you can customize and configure Grav websites from a nice and modern web UI. It offers easy backups. One click on the Backup button and you can directly download a full copy of your whole website - contents, configs, theme, simply everything packed into a nice little Zip archive.

Need to restore your whole site? Simply copy it over into a document root folder of your new webserver and you are good to go.

But one feature I love the most about Grav are routes and route aliases.

Global route aliases can easily be configured in the Admin Panel in the site config. This means, now all routes from October will still work and lead to the articles, although routes in my new website are different to those of the previous October CMS based website.

And even better: Until lately I had a lot of 404 log messages in October CMS because routes from my once used Nicola CMS where not valid anymore - but thanks to alias routes they will now work again! Awesome!

And even more impressive: you can define alias route for each single page or article, too. So this way I was able to correct some misspellings in slugs from October CMS articles, but those old misspelled links will still work while every newly generated link will have correctly spelled slugs and all are routed to the targeted article. Once again: awesome!

What to expect from the revived crowbyte blog

I always had the dream of crowbyte to once become the name for my company. While this dream never materialized and it is not very likely to happen in any near future I used the name and brand for my blog and this way established some kind of identity for crowbyte just by chance.

My intention now is to build on this ground. I will focus on tech topics. I started contributing to the openSUSE project, so maybe you will read some more in depth articles on the openSUSE project in the future.

As I will turn this blog a bit more into a home for my own thoughts and opinions you will very like see and read a lot more about them from now on.

5 year anniversary

Silently crowbyte.org turned 5 years old at the end of last year. I first registered crowbyte.org as my domain on 15th November 2013. So, better late than never:

Happy birthday, crowbyte.org!

The Tagline

I never had one, never thought I might need one but then, recently, I read that the tagline really matters. New to taglines, I tried to figure out some unique tagline.

No clue whether that worked out or not, but here it is:

open mind | open thoughts > blog

This is some kind of bash poetry. An open mind, piping it's results into open thoughts which are written into the blog.

That was the basic idea behind that. This is just a first try though and it might change through time. And in case you have better ideas for a tagline for the crowbyte blog - let me know, please!

Get social

Any questions? If so, get social and contact me on social media at Mastodon, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Diaspora*.

crowbyte.org