A Blogging Friday Flashback

Since my human is attending BlogPaws, I thought you might like to see how far my blog has come since it began! Most of my blog’s old looks still exist on archive.org’s Wayback Machine — I bet if you look up your own blog, you can find some of your past looks too!

This is from January 2003, when I first started blogging. My human didn’t even know about blog platforms at the time. She coded this html layout by hand… and it shows!

I love how it says, “Although my pedigree is impeccable, I only have a little bit of an attitude — I promise!” Um, yeah, that promise was broken in short order.

At first, the blog was just a monthly diary of what was going on in my life, but after a few months I added my advice column, and then book reviews — and my wall calendar! This grab is from late 2004. As you can see, my human was still hand-coding my site, and if anything, her skills had degraded some.

Eventually, my human improved the look of some of the sidebar links, and I added more things: my CafePress shop (now I am mostly on Zazzle), an interview with Sparta, the Mean Kitty (if you remember him), and more. This is from 2008. By then, my human wanted to switch me over to WordPress, but she was still figuring out how it worked.

Finally, in 2009, she switched my blog over to WordPress! It was a lot of work, since I had over 6 years’ worth of posts that had to be moved over manually to the new platform. And of course she had to get fancy with the homepage “slider” that featured my latest posts — and that everyone hated. For the first few months, it was brown (which went with my fur), but when I got the deal for my second book, I switched the colors to go with the book cover.

I stuck with that layout, terrible slider and all for longer than I wanted to! My human got a webmaster to create a new layout for me, but she flaked out after a few months. Then she found someone else who created what you see today! It’s not 100% perfect, but it is 1000% better than when I started!
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Having problems with your human or the other cats in your house? As the internet’s “Dear Abby With Claws,” I have answers to many annoying problems in my two award-winning books! Visit my author’s page on Amazon to buy one or both of my awesome Dear Sparkle books!