So, the story of this site.
I used to write something like so in this spot:
This site is created by a Danish-American family living in sunny Copenhagen, Denmark
That is still true.
I bought the domain name in June of 2001, and have been running sites under that name on and off ever since. I used all kinds of cheapo, lousy hosting until I — via Textpattern — arrived at TextDrive, being a VC200 and all. That ended, as we all know. After more mishaps with substandard hosts, I took the plunge into VPS and have not looked back.
As for software, it has been Textpattern, WordPress.com, Chyrp, and various attempts at homemade stuff in PHP as well as Ruby on Rails.
Then, I wanted to jump on the Jamstack bandwagon, and build the site in (mostly) Next.js with various data sources. However, in the long run, it was overkill, so I moved on to a 100% static solution, built with Hugo.
But that did not work as well as I had imagined. The great joy of using “blogging software” is of course that you can use any browser anywhere to fiddle with your content. Now I had to build on a physical machine and then upload.
Always having wondered about Django, I explored this a bit and found the exciting Wagtail CMS. Very nice, and I would definitely use it if I were to build a site professionally. That not being the case, the overhead seemed to be too much (after all: I want to write and design, not necessarily write Python code). And deployment could be an issue and a challenge.
Where to then? Unexpectedly, the answer turned out to be: Textpattern. Huh? A 17+ years old system with a lot of history? But, after all, I was part of that history and this feels somehow like coming home. As you learn to accept the limitations as well as embrace the possibilities, I cannot think of another piece of software that is as suitable for a project like mine. True: it is not as turnkey as WordPress can be. But not as infuriatingly obtuse, either.
Otherwise, the family photos gallery is statically created in jAlbum. Actually, I moved it to Piwigo as I did with the main photo gallery.
The very old family photos is an album exported from Aperture (RIP).
I did generate the main photo gallery in jAlbum, but found that the workflow for a dynamic album such as that is too cumbersome. Having to generate albums on one machine (where jAlbum and photos are located) and then uploading via FTP is not very agile. So: after much consideration, I switched to Piwigo and am quite happy. Strangely, over all those years when I looked for a good photo gallery solution, I just never looked into Piwigo more closely. When I did, I realized that it was the solution that fitted my needs best — not best in an absolute sense, but better than everything else I had tried.
There is also the old wunderkammer which, surprisingly, still works.