site updates

a changelog for a website, because why not

• 2026-10-23 4,500 views. The site passed four and a half thousand views. There's a short post, and the cat is wearing something new for the week. The sidebar now says "you are visitor #N of however many", so you can see how many numbers have been handed out, and the whole site has its own pixel cursor.
• 2026-10-18 books, music and links, finally. The books and music pages have real content instead of "coming soon", and the links page has its people and security sections filled in.
• 2026-10-14 3,000 views. Five weeks in, the site passed three thousand views. The cat has its party hat back for a week, and there's a short post about it. Also new: the guestbook has an optional website box, so if you have a site of your own it shows next to your name, and the webring page has the *nixring back now that it accepted me.
• 2026-10-02 2,000 views. The site passed two thousand views in its first three weeks, which is a lot more than I expected from a corner of the internet I only just built. The cat is wearing a party hat for a week to mark it, and there's a short thank-you post. Also new since the last entry: blog posts can have pictures, the listening panel can be pinned to one song (Spotify or YouTube) instead of following whatever I'm playing, and I can edit the whole site from my phone, so replies to the guestbook should come a lot faster. And the visitor number in the sidebar is finally real: it used to count only your own browser, and now it hands out numbers in order, one per visitor.
• 2026-09-21 now playing, and a guestbook that talks back. There's a live listening panel on the home page and /now now, pulled from Last.fm with album art. The little chip in the sidebar actually checks the guestbook instead of just claiming it's fine, and I can finally reply to entries, so go say something. The old buttons page is now cool websites, my own 88×31 button is a real downloadable file, Rewild the Web joined the webring page, and a couple of dead links got fixed.
• 2026-09-21 the cat finally looks like a cat. Redrew the pixel mascot. It was reading as a teal cube with a face, which is a bad look for a domain called rustyisacat. It has actual pointed ears and whiskers now. Also fixed a CSS bug boxing the He/Him and Aroace badges in a black square, and built myself a local GUI for editing the whole site: click-to-edit visual mode, one-button blog posts, and a panel for managing the 88×31 buttons without hand-editing HTML.
• 2026-09-10 full rebuild. Retired the old layout and rebuilt the entire site from scratch: new sidebar nav, homepage, about, projects, computers, music, books, blog, now, links, webring, guestbook, buttons, and this page. Added a mock guestbook, a random page button, an 88×31 button set, and a couple of things I'm not going to list here on purpose.
• 2026-09-11 much louder now. Pushed the whole visual language further into screaming-retro territory: chunky pixel-outlined logo, OS-window-style panel titlebars, a checkerboard divider strip, and a bolder graphic marquee. Also filled in most of the [WRITE ABOUT THIS] placeholders with actual facts about actual me.
• 2026-09-14 cleanup pass. Removed the random-page button (wasn't earning its keep), dropped the location mention from the homepage and about page for privacy, and retired the manual "copy hello-world.html and rename it" blog instructions in favor of an actual script that scaffolds a new post in one command.
• 2026-09-14 rings joined. Hotline Webring and Null Webring both confirmed.
• whenever the next thing happens this line updates itself. eventually.

known issues / to-do

• Decide whether the guestbook gets a real shared backend eventually.
• Take actual screenshots of the desktop setup for /computers.