Is Muskblog ready?

Deon Sanders it ain’t, but I seem to have gotten Muskblog to look like the rest of my website and it seems to function OK.

I’ve had real trouble finding a reliable internet connection in China but I think I’ve tracked one down and I hope when I get ADSL in my apartment my connection woes will be gone.

Please leave me a comment letting me know if you find any problems. I tested it exclusively in Opera for Mac OS X for maximum mainstream browser compatibility.

In 2025 is Muskblog now ready?

No. In both 2024 and 2025 I spent considerable time updating this website and its content. But the list of things I wish to do, I can not finish, not if I want to do professional development which is what I’m supposed to be doing this Sunday morning.

Last year I started redoing my taxonomy but became so frustrated with how my website and web host was performing I never editing every single post online. But I estimate I edited at least 400 and presumably the most important posts were edited. This post was last edited in 2020 I believe, but I deleted that paragraph in favour of a fresh one with links to my latest posts.

Measurably less popular in 2025

Google Analytics is basically no more but Google replaced it with Site Kit or however they’re rebranding it. It is slightly different JavaScript. It definitely isn’t the code they got from Urchin. Regardless my website is way less popular than it was ten or fifteen years ago. I needed to make it mobile friendly sooner and increase the page rendering speed.

HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

When I redid my homepage I made it more mobile friendly but I also made in PHP. For my old static HTML I did throw in the viewport in more places than I thought. But to truly make my old HTML more reader friendly I think I need to go back and add the <nav> tag.

Inspiration

I’ve used this HTML and CSS for so long I had forgotten who originally came up with the technique, but my WordPress theme indeed much of Muschamp dot ca is based on a technique documented by Adam Kelsey many years ago. He actually has his original post still up, copyright 2003. Even older HTML on this domain was either written by me or was based on something I saw online from a certain Blue Robot. I also used to read Zeldman regularly but was always more of an Eric Meyer guy. One of those two may have pointed my way to where I got my inspiration if not actual code samples twenty plus years ago.

Plugin to be more mobile friendly

For this blog I long ago switched to WPTouch, but I’m going to try to find the time to wrap my <ul> of links that is on pretty much every page in a <nav> tag, see if that just works. I can’t believe I didn’t think about that until August 31st 2025. I’m not even supposed to be editing old blog posts right now. But sometimes I notice something that needs fixing and I really do have a backlog of things I’ve been meaning to do for years and now in order to make Muskblog better and perhaps ween it off WPTouch a little I should wrap a <nav> tag around my navigation links.

How Muskblog looks

I never thought to take a screenshot of my blog and post it to my blog back in 2005. I can take one and have from the Wayback Machine but it isn’t terribly flattering. The little orange and green boxes were only there temporarily as I was adjusting the whitespace but that was the exact time the Wayback Machine chose to archive my website first.

In 2016, I took the above and below pictures but that is not exactly how my blog looks now. At some point I put the featured image to the right. I also changed the author photo to be a bigger more current photo that was taken by my employer or at least a coworker. My blog was more idiosyncratic in 2005 and for ten or more years and that brought me mostly grief. Now in 2025, it may be the most professional it has ever been, or it will be in 2026 as no way I have time to edit 300 blog posts, especially as I usually do a thorough job, fixing all the links, adding bigger better images, re-tagging, fixing other metadata etc.

How Muskblog looks in 2025

Since I managed to make it through twenty long hard years in the blogosphere and did link back to this post from my 20th blogiversary post I should remember to take a screenshot of how the blog actually looks. At some point I replaced the icons with another set because the set I was using didn’t have one social network I wanted to link to. Social media was a big deal for a while, but now AI is eating the Internet and no one will likely read this blog, but bots continue to read this blog, so I need to keep it up-to-date and easily navigate-able, but aesthetic considerations are now considerably less important.

This is why I don’t have a problem using HTML and CSS to serve up a minimal version to mobile users. It makes inline links more important which is good, because I have a lot of inline links and content. In fact fixing all the busted links and choosing what to link to, is a big part of redoing Muskblog’s taxonomy and making what was alway a website about my hobbies, more professional. But if I’m truly going to be professional I need to stop editing twenty year-old blog posts and do my online professional development course.

If you have thought on blogging, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, web design, Muskblog, or even professional development, this blog post still allows comments after twenty years.

This entry was originaly posted on September 19th, 2005, it was last edited on September 4th, 2025 and is filed under: Technology and tagged: Blogging, Web Design, WordPress.