About

How this site came to be

Oh Eweedy started as a small programming experiment. After building some pages locally (starting with the red div...), I heard about bplaced. It was exactly what I needed (a web host) to make the page publicly available, just like all those other "real pages" on the so-called internet. Piece by piece I managed to get it online, for free. How? I read stuff on the internet about the internet and focused on PHP and FTP and SSH uploads. Weird stuff, it was. Now it has become what you are looking at. Below I collected some of the milestones. The oldest ones are not included, since I can't find them right now. Cheers!

  1. Until 2022

    Oh Eweedy, the Bilder Blog

    This is how the gallery looked and what it was called until 2022: "Oh Eweedy – Bilder Blog", written in German and built in plain PHP. You could sign up, upload pictures, leave comments and find the blog on Facebook and Tumblr. The oldest piece of code I found so far is the gallery, version 0.2 from May 2015. It already used jQuery for the first time, and later Lightbox let you click a picture to see it big and flip through the gallery.

    Screenshot: Oh Eweedy – Bilder Blog, March 2022
    Oh Eweedy – Bilder Blog, March 2022

  2. 2020

    Learning the craft

    During my studies at HTW Berlin I built my first apps with Ruby on Rails. I carried the patterns I learned there over into my plain and cluttered PHP site and reworked it: a proper, hand-written structure with shared blocks like the head and navigation pulled in via require_once, so each page only switches on what it needs. I worked on login, dark mode, more automation. And a new design, like always.

  3. October 2023

    Discovering Laravel

    I started to learn Laravel and play around with it. It felt familiar: like Ruby on Rails for Ruby, Laravel is a framework full of patterns for building websites, only with PHP. It follows the "convention over configuration" philosophy, so a lot just works with smart defaults instead of endless setup. My hand-written includes would become Blade templates with layouts and components. The plan: move the site from plain PHP to Laravel one day. Along the way I tried out automated tests and a build pipeline on GitHub.

  4. March 2024

    The old site goes on GitHub

    The PHP site moved into the "oheweedy" repository and got an automatic FTP upload. A new footer and image scaling followed. In July a small script exported all image blobs from the database to files, the first step of the migration.

  5. April 2024

    Laravel 11 in containers

    "oe-app-11" tried Laravel 11 with Breeze, Sail, MySQL and a dev container for GitHub Codespaces. The setup was worth sharing, so it became its own template: laravel-11-sail-codespace.

  6. April – July 2024

    The home of this site

    On 29 April 2024 the work moved to "oe-app-docker-compose", built on Andrew Schmelyun's docker-compose setup for Laravel. May brought image uploads with resizing, email verification, the first tests and a simple gallery. In July a GitHub Action started deploying to Lima-City and version 1.0 brought over every post from the old site.

  7. 2024 – 2025

    Weedy Gallery grows up

    Feature by feature the gallery grew: pagination, image variants for faster loading, the privacy pages, drafts and sensitive posts, user profiles, and comments only visible to members.

    Screenshot: The first Laravel design on desktop
    The first Laravel design on desktop
    Screenshot: The same design on mobile
    The same design on mobile

  8. 2026

    A fresh coat of paint

    Version 6.0 in March added image zoom, a lock icon for sensitive posts and stronger contrast. In October the site got a complete redesign: a new layout and navigation, gallery search, a polished mobile view and freely licensed demo data for development.

    Screenshot: The redesign, October 2026
    The redesign, October 2026

Keep it going

Weedy Gallery is a hobby project without ads. If you enjoy it, you can buy me an ice cream on Ko-fi.