A Brief History of “Das Haus von Ruh”

This website and blog have gone through a number of iterations over the years.

It started back in September 2005, using a Blogger site. This lasted until December 2007, when I switched to a website using Apple’s iWeb software. This allowed me to create a much nicer website.

My iWeb site lasted until October 2011. At that point, Apple announced it was discontinuing iWeb and, more importantly, shutting down the MobileMe publishing platform that it ran on.

I then switched to Squarespace, which was a pretty nice platform. The problem is that I started my website using Squarespace version 5. They upgraded to version 6, and then again to version 7. Unfortunately, they never provided good upgrade tools, and my website stayed at version 5. Technology moved on, and many people started viewing sites on phones or tablets. DasHausVonRuh became increasingly unusable over time.

Meanwhile, I was able to publish all of the iWeb material onto Dropbox. This worked for years, until they decided to no longer support this feature.

Frustrated at all of this, I switched to WordPress in October 2018. WordPress is an open source platform used by over 60 million websites. While I’m running it on WordPress.com, I can move the site to another provider, or even host it myself. With such a large installed base, I’m confident that I won’t have to go through another migration without good tools to help.

With this new website, I was able to import all of my old Blogger pages, and all of my old Squarespace pages. The only remaining problem was my iWeb site. This included almost four years of posts, including the first years of Nate’s life. iWeb worked on my local Mac, but it’s a 32-bit application, and when I upgrade to the latest macOS release, I’ll be unable to even view these posts locally. I began the slow process of moving pages, individually, from iWeb to WordPress. This continued throughout 2019.

I’m glad to say that this process is complete. If you scroll back through the archives on this site, you’ll see over 1000 posts covering 2005-2019, with obviously more to come.

And here are the final remnants of the iWeb website, an interesting time capsule.