Muskblog: Making the Internet better since 1995

So I’ve been at this whole blogging game a long time. How long? Well I put up my first homepage in 1995, I put up this WordPress blog in 2005…

Back in the day, ie the 90s when you redid your homepage it was a big deal. Now everyone and their dog is online and people don’t even need to know HTML to have a ‘home page’. I’ve been maintaining a homepage online since 1995. I’ve never been the biggest fan of JavaScript or anything that makes a page load slowly, however the Internet keeps changing…

This summer I spent too much time working on my webs tie. I spent a lot of time revising my WordPress theme, appeasing the Googlebot, adding structured meta data, improving social network integration, revising text, deleting crap, and for what? I don’t even want to be popular. It seems popularity is equated with success, especially online. Popularity is not synonymous with Quality, and it certainly isn’t synonymous with Success…

I just got an email that looked like it came from Apple. It looked like I or someone pretending to be me had changed some settings on my AppleID, something that is entirely possible given I’ve had to reset my password many times and I just downloaded several major updates from Apple yesterday. But was it a real email from Apple, no it was a phishing exercise from Russia…

In fact it can’t have any images at all. I’m still not satisfied with how thumbnails are being added to my RSS 2.0 feed, in my opinion it isn’t perfect because SimplePie can’t find them when it looks in enclosure->thumbnails…

I knew exactly what I wanted. I wanted to thumbnails with a proper enclosure in my RSS 2.0 feeds. Other blogs have this, why doesn’t mine? I enabled featured images in my theme, I got them to appear on my blog’s homepage, in the archives, even in the posts themselves if I wanted. I followed tutorials, I installed plugins, I consulted support forums. Still no thumbnails in my RSS feeds.

Although I’ve maintained a WordPress blog since 2005, I’ve only ever had the one theme. I made the theme myself back in the summer of 2005. I think a tutorial from Urban Giraffe may have provided the basis for my theme. I made sure my theme and entire blog fit within the already establish look, feel, and navigation of Muschamp.ca and I’ve dutifully updated the theme, every time a WordPress upgrade has forced me. I’ve also added many minor changes, but a look in the Wayback machine shows how little has changed until just the last few days…

Although you should definitely take advantage of Google Analytic’s five custom variables and custom reports, there is something to be said for a standardized high level dashboard. I kept refining one, taking bits from here and ideas from there. Now I think I got all the data that will fit above the fold and decided it was ready to share with the world…