Revamping mckoss.com

mckoss.com has been on the internet since at least 1999, when it looked like this:

I even had a way of sending SMS messages to my pager-watch, and my old cell phone number was on the internet for all to see. This page was all hand-crafted by me; it may not have even had any CSS in it, for all I can tell. Just some align=left, <h1>, <i> tags, etc. I think I may have used FrontPage to create it initially.

Several years ago, I got fed up with my web host, and I just let mckoss.com fade into the Wayback Machine. It was a shame, as it was getting several thousand reads per day, so someone was getting something out of the content.

I’ve been meaning to resurrect mckoss.com using a more modern design (or at least some design). A few times I played with Jekyll as a static site generator, but I really don’t like the toolchain that depends on Ruby, a language I never much cared for, with some obscure (to me) package installation mechanisms.

So now, in 2021, I am trying Hugo, a static site generator written in Go. Go is a language I actually like, and besides, Go compiles to native binaries and so there are no third-party packages to have to install. A Go program is self-contained (as desktop software should be). I started with a site theme based on Hugo Cards, but I’ve modified it extensively to optimize it for my use.

Out of nostalgia, here are some more milestones in the history of mckoss.com:

I started blogging about stuff that kept me busy after leaving Microsoft (travel, flying, skiing). And the Big Seattle Earthquake of 2001 was big news.

I finally updated the heading to use some images and thumbnails for the different projects I posted about. Definitely getting a little away from the 1999 look.

Except for adding a few more projects (and promoting my new hobby of wake-surfing to the header image), mckoss.com’s final appearance looked much the same up through 2015. Note the now-defunct Flash player embedding a YouTube video for our failed social-bookmarking startup.

Now that I have a more modern static web site generator to update this blog, I’m hopeful that I can resurrect some of the old content that may still be of interest and import it into Hugo.

Addendum (September 29, 2026)

Five years later, I gave mckoss.com another full revamp, this time with a more Modernist design: a sidebar, a grid of posts, cleaner typography, and larger images. I worked with coding agents throughout. Claude Designer shaped the look, Claude Opus 5.5 helped build the new Hugo theme, and OpenAI’s Codex helped with the finishing touches, including this post’s new “under construction” image.

After more than 25 years, mckoss.com is apparently still under construction.