20 Years

After a little over 20 years, escape now! is still online – something I probably didn't expect myself back then. I remember registering the domain shortly before my Abitur, and I was incredibly proud of the nerdy domain name. There wasn't much public content in the early days; most of it was hidden behind a login, for friends and fellow students. From 2010 on, the first LaTeX how-tos appeared on the blog, posts that still draw the occasional visitor here today. With my first big trip in 2013, the blog filled with travel content for the first time, and the domain name started to fit even better. That's how escape now! became the documentation project for all my travels.

Hello Kirby!

Twenty years is a good time to release a completely new version of the website. From 2007 to 2023, escape now! ran on my self-programmed pro‹tag›, but for lack of time it was finally shut down in 2023. The switch to WordPress back then felt a bit painful, and I never really warmed to it. The only good thing was that blog posts could be created much faster with the Gutenberg editor. In the meantime I even made some notes for a new edition of pro‹tag›. But that's no longer necessary, because a few weeks ago I found Kirby.

Kirby is a flat-file CMS that stores the content in TXT files on disk and puts the site together with PHP. There's a modern Vue app as an optional GUI. And after just a few experiments it was clear: this is it. Kirby is the first CMS that really feels right to me. It was an incredible amount of fun to rebuild the site with Kirby.

The layout is quite similar to the previous version, but the functionality and consistency of the site have improved enormously.

• Bilingual: Kirby handles multiple languages out of the box, so the site is now available in English and German much more consistently. Many old blog posts still lack English translations, but the menu, contact and comment forms etc. are now fully bilingual. From now on, the goal is to always publish new content in both languages.
• Fast: Without having to access a database, the site is finally fast again. And thanks to Kirby's built-in cache, not everything has to be re-parsed on every page view.
• Beautiful: With a little help from my new friend Claude, some really beautiful photo galleries came to life. My favorite is the carousel gallery, which you'll now find in most blog posts. Individual photos get much more of the spotlight – it's perfect for what I want to do here: show pictures from my travels.
• Mobile: While building the layout, usability on smartphones was even more of a priority than in the previous version. Even so, I still prefer a laptop – photos simply look so much better on a big screen.
• Light/Dark: New is the light/dark mode for the theme. It should even pick up your own preference automatically.
• Modern: Lots of little things have moved with the times, for example all images are finally served as WebP.
• Complete: When moving from pro‹tag› to WordPress, only the bike trip and Bits & Bytes posts made the move. Well over a hundred were left behind. The ones that aren't too embarrassing after all this time have now made it here as well. For example, you'll find all the New Zealand posts on the blog, and everything from Daheeme¹‘Daheeme‘ – Saxon term for ‘home’..

Where the journey is heading

The new website means that blog posts will keep appearing here. There are still so many travel stories that could be told; photos that are slumbering on my hard drive, and then there's the idea of extending the bike trip by a few more kilometers.

For this site you don't need an Instagram account, you don't have to log in with any shady providers, the visitor counter running on my own server doesn't pass any info on to advertising networks, and the like button stores nothing but the number of times it has been clicked. escape now! is still proper classic internet, in a time when, sadly, most things only happen on closed platforms. Maybe that's exactly why this blog has been around for 20 years.

So drop by again every now and then, click the little hearts or write a few lines – it motivates me to keep blogging.