vŏlūtābrŭm, noun (vŏlūtō) (poet., late Latin) a wallowing-place for swine; a pig wallow.

Volutabrum.de was an online directory of German translations of Latin texts. Sounds like a niche, but isn’t wasn’t!

Latin is the third-most popular foreign language to study in school in Germany, after English and French, with the fraction of students choosing Latin peaking near 10% during the 2000s (source). I was one of those students and started this page when I needed it in high school.

While big web directories like Yahoo had already been replaced by search engines at the time Volutabrum started, specialized small directories were still quite common.

Later I tinkered with adding original content, bookstore affiliate links, and even a translation service to the page. All these experiments were short-lived.

Version 1 of the page was written in PHP with hand-crafted XHTML and CSS markup, backed by a MySQL database. It was hosted together with all my other websites on a site5.com Virtual Private Server.

Initially it was on a subdomain of my personal website until 2007 when I bought volutabrum.de. Fun fact: In 2000s Germany you can legally drink beer before you can legally buy a domain.

This screenshot is from the earliest snapshot of volutabrum.de available in the Wayback Machine:

Version 2: In 2021 code rot caught up with me: The code was still in a PHP version well past its best-by date and site5.com was in the terminal phase of its private equity decline.

I stubbornly refused to shut down my oldest web project. I rewrote the code in Python and Django and migrated hosting to an AWS EC2 instance (I was working at AWS at that time).

In 2023, I really wanted to try out AWS CDK so I converted the page to that and switched hosting to AWS Lambda with mangum.

Dead links are what finally made me pull the plug in 2026. Over the years I had made various manual and semi-automated attempts to keep the directory contents current. But who needs a web directory now that we have LLM-generated responses on Google and superhuman machine translations?

My analytics prowess is on full display with this project: After logging 196k visitors in 2012, I failed to update the ga.js tracking code which was sunset in 2012! The total visitor count of the site over its lifetime will never be known but was likely in the low millions. To all of them: Thanks for stopping by!