15 Years of kropp.name

On February 1, 2011, I acquired kropp.name. According to the whois data, it’s been registered 10 years before, but unused. Since then, it’s been my personal homepage and my Internet identity.

I don’t have any screenshots of old pages, and the Git history dates back to April 2012. So the first few years are lost to time. But thanks to the wonderful Wayback Machine I could still take a look at them.

2011

At first my homepage was just a simple HTML file with a handful of links.

At that time I was fascinated by the idea of a static site generator. And Hyde was the first one I tried. It was promoted as Jekyll’s evil twin and was written in Python, which I liked more than Ruby.

2014

So it stuck for a while, with just a minor font and photo update.

And Twitter was still good that time, so I even included a recent tweets widget right in my homepage.

2015

But I was increasingly dissatisfied with its performance and lack of features. So I decided to try something else. And I found Hugo, which I’ve been using since 2015.

2017

At first the page was trilingual, with the main content in English, occasional triathlon and run updates in Russian, and a few pages in German.

It gradually evolved over the years, while the main page stayed the same, again not counting for a photo refresh.

2022

I ditched language versions, as I didn’t have enough content and willingness to maintain them. Translating the content was never a goal for me.

The font has changed to Inter, which I’ve been using since then.

2023

The site reached the design I’m using now.

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