stebre.ch: Relaunch and name change
stebre.ch: I have secretly relaunched my personal website and also changed the name. But I don't want to refrain from giving you a little insight.
Why a new name?
With a rebrand you risk problems with recognition and the danger of losing findability in search engines. But hey - it's my personal website and my playground to try out new things. I don't have to worry about anything commercial, so I'm willing to put in the effort.
When I bought the domain pixelstrol.ch in 2011, I thought the name combination with the top-level domain .ch was particularly cool. I think calling myself a rascal is now outdated and no longer worthy of my advanced age 😉. When I gave myself the name pixelstrolch, the main focus was still exclusively on design topics.
SteBre is the abbreviation of my first and last name. Admittedly, this is not extremely imaginative. But it represents me and my interests exactly and is flexible in terms of content.
The evolution of the logos and the CMS used
With each domain change, I also taught myself a different tool for creating websites. After experimenting with Flash, I built the first Joomla website with brechbuehl-web. If you take a look back with WaybackMachine, brechbuehl-web.ch is unfortunately displayed without styles.
The logo has evolved as follows:
Logo brechbuehl-web.ch Version 1
Logo brechbuehl-web.ch Version 2
Logo brechbuehl-web.ch Version 3
Logo brechbuehl-web.ch Version 4
With pixelstrol.ch came the switch to WordPress
With the name change to pixelstrol.ch came the switch to WordPress. From the beginning I had used my own themes for it. The themes are described here:
The various logos I used until 2022 are as follows:
Logo pixelstrol.ch Version 1
Logo pixelstrol.ch Version 2
Logo pixelstrol.ch Version 3
And now?
With stebre.ch I no longer use a CMS, but Gatsby as a static site generator. I write the articles in simple Markdown and use them as a data source in Gatsby. As a writing program I use iA Writer, for which I have also written a template.
The design of the website is self-developed and uses some nice effects like
- coloring the posts on mouse hover
- animated fading in of elements when scrolling
Gatsby has been replaced by 11ty. The content is now maintained in Notion and downloaded as Markdown, see also Connect 11ty with Notion.
Still at the beginning
The website is still under construction and I still have a lot to do. If you are interested you can have a look at the planned features in the Github repository.
I've also decided to blog more regularly. Let's see if I succeed 😅.
The new logo
Logo Stebre
As you can see – I stayed true to the orange. Although here in the header of the website I use a negative version of it. The new logo is an abstract figurative mark that represents my initials SB. The minimalist appearance and thick lines allow the logo to be used in very small sizes.