27th of April, 2026
100 Webmaster Questions

From mouseling.net, first seen on mycorrhiza.space.

I saw these around and figured it'd be nice to answer them as an extended intro, since I just started this blog recently (aside from all the posts imported from a previous blog).

1. Please introduce yourself.
bogbody, or Speak the Sky, or MurderVT (or just Murder).
2. How long have you been making websites?
5 years.
3. And what got you into the hobby?
I started off learning PHP and MySQL to turn a messy spreadsheet of forum RPG info into a more-searchable database. The site kinda sucked, but later that year I built an HTML file version of one of my tabletop games and that experience was so much better than using Word or Affinity Publisher that I completely switched to writing HTML (and CSS and JavaScript). I could add settings like light/dark mode in one file! I could make interactive widgets! I could style things in explicit procedural ways instead of having to use a WYSIWYG editor! Without that, I probably never would've gone back to making websites.
4. What kind of website are you most interested in?
Blogs about more than just people's dev jobs; sites with a sense of place; sprawling chaotic webs; meticulous artistic statements; Cool Small Sites™; digital wilderness.
5. What's your workflow? Do you plan your websites out thoroughly or do you come up with the design as you go along?
I have a general idea and refine it as I add the content. Normally there's some weird edge or tricky idea that gets sanded down so I can actually get the site online.
6. Please link to your biggest inspirations.
Too many sites to count, but here's a few:
7. What's your favourite part about making websites?
Being able to share something.
8. And the thing you struggle with the most?
Refactoring JavaScript that should probably just be left alone.
9. Do you keep the same layout on all of your pages? Or do you use different ones?
My plan with this site's for layout and style to look the same within each section but different between them.
10. How confident are you with CSS?
When I was starting out I spent maybe a week getting confused and annoyed over selector specificity issues, but there's so many easy ways to resolve them (:where(), layers, nesting…) and writing thoughtful CSS for semantic elements in simple pages makes it so much easier to avoid them in the first place. Sometimes I've gotta look up flex/grid stuff and I'm not caught up on scroll timelines or anchors, but in general I think I'm okay at this.
11. Do you know how to correctly use <dl>?
The <dl> element is a description list: a set of items where each item is one or more terms followed one or more descriptions. It's basically HTML's generic key–value list that works for glossaries, Q&A, creative credits, timelines, and more.
12. What is your favourite HTML element?
I guess the expected answer is the hyperlink, <a>, right? It's the foundation of the web. But for a hipster answer: the <i> element, redefined (on MDN, anyway) as the “idiomatic text element”. Out of <b>, <i>, and <u> it's the one that came out of the semantic turn with the best new name and most useful niche purpose.
13. If you're making a new web page from scratch, what is the first thing you do?
Copy the HTML of another page of mine that's most similar to what I want.
14. Do you know JavaScript?
Yes.
15. How about PHP?
Before I knew JavaScript.
16. Does your website have a theme that you stick to?
The theme is that there is no theme.
17. Are you more focused on content or design?
I'm trying to be both. Some sections of this site, like Seaglass or this blog, are really content-focused and lean heavily on browser styles with a little extra on top. Other parts are more customised, like PICO:3 and Cosmic Neighbourhood. A few sections I'm still working on are gonna be wilder: full-on 3D spaces, fake desktops with draggable windows, etc.
18. Do you own a domain name? If not, would you ever want to?
Yes… but technically no, since you don't own something if you're gotta pay for it every year for the rest of your (or its) life.
19. What do you think of nostalgia-focused or “retro” websites?
A lot of them are inaccessible same-y conservative throwbacks. A lot of others are visually interesting, if stylistically meticulous (they're built to look exactly one way).
20. Is your HTML valid? Do you even check?
It fucking better be!!
21. What are your opinion on buttons and banners?
Buttons are cute. Banners (if I'm thinking of the right thing) remind me too much of ads.
22. What do you think of button walls in particular?
I have no strong feelings one way or the other.
23. If you started over again, would you make something similar or completely different?
I'd pick one of the sections of my site and use its style for everything on the new site—go really deep on that one look.
24. Are you envious of other people's websites?
No.
25. What text editor do you use?
Sublime Text. Before that, BBEdit.
26. Why do you use that one?
It's good enough.
27. Do you host your image files on your web server, or on another host?
My own hosting. What's the point of having server space if you're not gonna put your stuff on it? You think your free Neocities account is gonna be twice as expensive if you use more storage?
28. This might not be relevant to you, but what's your opinion on the Neocities vs Nekoweb debate?
I didn't know there was one. It doesn't sound like an important debate.
29. How much server space would you estimate your main website takes up?
A few dozen megabytes, mostly thanks to the gifs in The Third Dimension.
30. Do you keep local backups of your files?
Yes.
31. Do you prefer simple or highly visual websites?
No preference.
32. Do you stick to certain colours? Do you do that on purpose, or is it your subconscious?
Some day I want to come up with a 16-colour palette (like e.g. datagoblin) and try using it for everything, but right now, no. On an earlier site I even had a theme picker with 24 different colour schemes.
33. Have you ever thought about quitting? Why?
No.
34. Do you have many webmaster friends, or is it a solitary hobby?
I'm friends with people who have their own sites, but I don't that shared hobby is a major part of our friendships.
35. Do people in your real life know about your website?
Absolutely not.
36. Do you update your website very often? How often is "very often"?
I update this site every Sunday aside from blog posts and bug fixes, which go up whenever they're done. That feels maybe average for personal sites?
37. And the overall design, do you change that much? Why or why not?
The CSS Zen Garden approach is interesting and it's also cool how e.g. Anh and Sage restyle their sites (sometimes radically) every few months, but it's not for me.
38. Is your website more you-focused, hobby-focused, or outside world-focused?
Any. All.
39. Do you do web design professionally?
No.
40. If not, would you like to? And if you're comfortable answering, what do you do for work?
It's a tough question. From the outside, it looks like pro web dev overcomplicates things in an almost ritualistic way that'd really annoy me. On the other hand, gov.uk is fast and functional because smart, motivated people put in serious effort to make it that way and it could be nice to work in that kinda environment.
41. Do you communicate with people by email very much?
My inboxes, like most people's, are wastelands of website notifs, password resets, “HELLO WE ARE YOUR BANK” messages, etc.
42. Some people reject social media and use websites as a replacement. Do you keep social media outside of your website?
I think common spaces and infrastructure like social media are essential for online society (even if they're owned/moderated by specific people). Everyone only being able to communicate by private emails, blog posts responding to blog posts, and webmentions… I feel like that risks turning into anti-social libertarianism.
43. How about instant messengers? Do you use a mainstream one like Discord or Telegram? Or something like Matrix? Do you avoid them?
I use Discord, but interestingly the most successful (stable, fun-having) social circle I'm in on the fediverse treats Mastodon more like a porous group chat than a microblogging platform.
44. Do you listen to music while you work on websites? If so, what kinds of artists?
Sometimes. I don't have themed playlists, though.
45. Do you keep everything you make on one website, or do you have more than one?
All-in-one.
46. On a similar note, do you keep to one topic on your site, or many?
Many.
47. Do you present your real self, or at least try? Or do you construct a persona on purpose?
I don't consciously put on any kinda persona here, “real” or otherwise.
48. Have you ever made a good friend thanks to your website?
No, but I haven't really shared it around, so who knows in future?
49. Are you happy with the way HTML and CSS currently work?
There's some annoying stuff grandfathered in, like doctypes or the default value for box-sizing that almost nobody keeps or how list markers don't inherit the list's font by default, but mostly it's fine and I just have nitpicks. Nested tags work well for structuring web pages and their content. CSS specificity can be tricky at first but recent changes have made it much easier.
50. What are practices that you think people should avoid?
The checkbox hack. Just learn a little JavaScript, or use <details>–<summary>, or use hash links and :target.
51. What about under-utilised practices, or things you think people should do more?
  • Read or skim the HTML reference and CSS reference on the MDN (or W3Schools). Just knowing “there's an element/style property/selector for that” is super useful even if you don't remember exactly how it works.
  • Learn what accessible web design looks like: use preference media queries like @prefers-color-scheme and @prefers-reduced-motion, use semantic elements, use accessible colour combos and so on.
  • Cache-bust assets you're probably gonna change over time, like stylesheets, scripts, background images, etc.
Here's a big one: Shrink and optimise your media! I've seen a megapixel GIF scaled to a few dozen pixels square. I've seen a couple hundred kilobytes of inline SVG logo on every page of a web performance expert's site. You don't have to go down the ditherpunk or textmode route and mould your whole aesthetic to lo-fi tech—just run PNGs through TinyPNG (or pinga, which I recently found out about but looks good), use MP3/Ogg/Opus instead of WAV, use lower-quality JPGs with smoothing, use WebP (the hate is outdated even though the praise was always partly hype).
52. Do you use a lot of semantic HTML? Or are you guilty of generic structure?
I use a lotta semantic elements, but <div> and <span> still have a place in semantic web design.
53. Do you consider different browsers?
I stick to stuff that works in most browser engines by looking at what's been valid for at least a few years across Firefox, Chrome, and Safari on caniuse.com.
54. Speaking of, what's your preferred browser? Convince your readers why they should use it.
Firefox with the “AI” switched off. Safari's lagging behind and Chrome's not noticeably better than Firefox for me. Google's also been deliberately making the internet much worse for at least a decade now so I don't really give a shit that their browser team implements ultra-niche bleeding-edge CSS/JavaScript a few months before everyone else. Getting giddy over that stuff is honestly kinda embarrassing when Google's regularly making pushes to, for instance, wipe adblocking from the face of the internet.
55. And what OS are you on?
Linux Mint.
56. Do you have a strong opinion on that, or do you just happen to use it?
I spent over a decade using MacOS mostly because a few apps I needed for work were Mac-only. Early this year I finally got a new Windows machine (well, a cheap refurbished 2023 laptop) and Windows 11 was so bad it made Apple's walled-garden condescension feel charming and breezy, so I overwrote it with Linux. I went with Mint because people whose tech opinions I respect suggested it as a distro for people with no Linux experience. It's been good so far!
57. Are your websites mobile-friendly?
I try to get them readable down to 300 pixels wide.
58. What are your thoughts on autoplay?
It's so obviously a bad idea to let just anyone run any video/audio in your browser with no consent.
59. What are your thoughts on webrings? Are you in any?
Too brittle. I once checked out a bunch and about a third of the sites in each index either didn't add the webring widget or were dead and gone, shattering the ring. People should just make link directories on their own sites.
60. Do you have any web shrines? What do you like to see in that sort of page?
This is a way of making websites and relating to art online that kinda passed me by. I guess I like to see creative and analytical stuff and a sense of community? Yatpay's Haibane Shrine is a bit of a time capsule but it's got things like the original Haibane Renmei doujins, recordings of them playing music from the soundtrack, collections of images, links to official and fan sites and forums and even cosplay tips (defunct but still available on the internet archive), a writeup of the first episode… It's real engagement with a loved work of art and other people who love it too.
61. Are your websites “cliché”, in your opinion?
I don't think so?
62. What is your ideal website? Are you striving for that, or for something else?
I don't have an ideal website, because too many of the kinds of sites I'm interested in are contradictory.
63. Are you an artist? Do you draw or design your own assets?
I made pretty much any image on this site that's not a screenshot or a cover of a piece of media, e.g. I made the avatars in Cosmic Neighbourhood and the 3D models in The Third Dimension. I even made some of the fonts (the logotype/icon font in PICO:3, the whole typeface in Cosmic Neighbourhood). For a bunch of early tabletop games I released (2019–2020) I took images from asset sites like Pixabay and pexels, but my aesthetic's moved towards things I can make, like low-res pixel art, vector art, icons, fonts, heavy photobashing or filtering, CSS gradients, repurposed ephemera or public domain stuff etc. I still get some fonts from elsewhere, because there's too much labour involved in making one not to.
64. What are your favourite resource sites?
Some museums (like MoMA) release photos of their collections to the public domain. Then there's the Biodiversity Heritage Library's collection on flickr, a lot of which is public domain, and more general sites like Wikimedia Commons. I don't take much from these sites/collections (see last answer), but they're still good.
65. Is there a habit you just can't get away from no matter how hard you try?
I guess a lotta this site's sections so far have a similar structure (full-width header, centred text column), but it's a good baseline so what can I say?
66. What's your biggest advice for a new webmaster?
Look at the code for a few personal sites made by different kinds of people with different levels of experience. Skim HTML and CSS references (W3Schools, MDN, wherever). Learning how to use a static site generator (or writing your own) will save you in the long run (if you're a programming beginner, try Strawberry Starter).
67. Do you keep all your styling in CSS? Or do you hard-code some?
Mostly external stylesheets, but I use <style> elements and [style] attributes for styles with smaller scopes (one-page, one-element).
68. What do you think of frameset layouts?
Just use a static site generator to put your header, footer etc. in every page.
69. How about table-based layouts?
Just use grid, flex, columns, CSS background positioning, etc.
70. Do you subscribe to the ideas of “one-column”, “two-column” and “three-column” layouts? Do you use any of these?
These aren't really complex enough ideas to subscribe to, but… most of this site's sections so far use a one-column layout.
71. Do you spend longer on the HTML or the CSS?
CSS. It's easy to figure out the right HTML elements and attributes to use, but CSS and especially JavaScript introduce so many ways to do things. (I treat the actual content as separate from HTML coding, and content is the real base of the progressive enhancement pyramid.)
72. Have you ever made a page with no CSS? It's useful for your thoughts.
This is neat in modern browsers thanks to reader mode, but I only do this when I need a page up now and haven't got any styling done.
73. Do you ever find yourself making layouts with nothing to put on them? Or do you only make layouts when the need arises?
Basically never.
74. Would you consider yourself a beginner? Or advanced? Somewhere in the middle?
In the middle. I write my own static site generators, I can make alright responsive layouts, and I can debug my code. I can implement some algorithms and reverse-engineer styles. I have a good grasp of my limits and I can research and learn how to do things I couldn't before. Still, there's a lot I don't know, a lot I do vaguely know but don't actually do, and a lotta people who're a lot more skilled than me.
75. Do you have a habit of looking at the source code of websites you visit?
Yes.
76. How did you learn how to make websites?
Heavy use of W3Schools, then the MDN, plus messing around in an online PHP sandbox. Paragon('s blog) and OWASP were also good for learning dynamic site security. Later on I used Zonelets for a while (and wrote my own version I called Zonelots), but outgrew it. CodePen's newsletter was pretty helpful for a while, too.
77. Do you ever force elements to do things they're not supposed to?
You mean like <div style="display:inline"> or <span style="display:block">?
78. Thoughts on floating elements?
Assuming this is about the CSS float property: It's neat, but don't use it for layout when flex or grid would do.
79. When you're sizing stuff, what do you use first? Do you use px, em, %, or something else?
Whatever an element needs given where it's at. For instance, when scaling images, there are times where % is best (e.g. block-level images in a text column), where px is best (e.g. images with hard sizes like the cartridges in PICO:3), and where em is best (e.g. icons inline in text).
80. Do you have a favourite font?
In websafe fonts, probably Georgia, which I use for this blog and some other places (though due to the rise of mobile browsers, no font is web-safe any more). Overpass and Bitter are better, but when I use them I've gotta host or import the font files. I use EB Garamond a lot in analog game HTML files, to the point of making my own custom version of it. As for fonts I've made, I think Answerer, the WIP font I use on Cosmic Neighbourhood, is coming along well and Dicier's one of my biggest achievements despite its flaws.
81. Would you run a website with another person? How would that work?
As a place to post stuff, sure. As a personal expression where every part of the site's free to change at any time… it'd be an interesting experiment?
82. Do you surf the Web to find new personal websites very often?
I don't go out specifically looking for sites but sometimes it does happen.
83. Do you bookmark other people's websites? How would you feel knowing someone else bookmarked yours?
I keep a set of bookmarks in a custom bookmark page inspired by Alex Chan's bookmarks static site (but way smaller and simpler). If someone bookmarked my site… that'd be cool? But I know personally it's a very low-effort engagement.
84. What do you want people to be most impressed with when they see your website?
No idea. I think I'd rather interest and encourage people than impress them, though.
85. Are you interested in technology outside of websites? Do you collect?
If we're talking about devices/gadgets/etc., then no.
86. How often and for how long are you online?
Too often, too long.
87. When it comes to your website, who is your target audience?
There isn't one.
88. Have you ever been interested in XHTML?
I kinda write it anyway (it's less ambiguous), but I also do XHTML-invalid things like writing boolean attributes without values (it's less tedious).
89. Do you program in general? Have you ever written a program for use with or on your website, not counting simple JavaScript?
I used to do scientific stuff in MATLAB, but my recent programming's mostly web-related one way or another. I've made some tools that take in content and spit out HTML, not to put it online, just because the browser's a pretty good and easy rendering engine. For instance: Marrow, a perl script that takes in a bunch of text files written in custom lightweight markup and spits out a single-page HTML notebook—I've got four notebooks like this on my computer (notes about this site, recipes, game engine notes, general notes), none of which go online. As for tools on this site, there's the Tools section in Babel, though they're all pretty simple.
90. Speaking of programs that help you make websites, what do you think of static site generators (SSGs)? Have you ever used one?
I make my own. There's one for this blog, one for Seaglass, and one for my review collections (right now, Kittenboxd and PICO:3). All the other site sections so far are hand-written or just cloned and tweaked (like the media trackers). It's not hard to make an SSG if you're only making it for yourself and don't need to account for a million ways to do every little thing like the big generators do, and they make it so much easier to apply updates and fixes across the site (or parts of it). It's also a good way to start learning a new programming language.
91. Do you keep a hitcounter? Why or why not?
No. What's the point? It feels like proto-social-media-metrics.
92. Do you frequent forums? Which ones?
I used to, and still lurk.
93. Do you write your page content directly into the editor, or do you prepare it elsewhere, like a text document or a Word document?
I write everything directly in my editor.
94. Do you think you appear cool to others? A more accurate answer now: do other people ever say you're cool?
No idea.
95. Are you embarrassed of your old work? Have you ever deleted everything out of shame?
No and no. I delete things I think have run their course, or that really annoy me, but most of the things I made in the past were necessary to get where I am now.
96. Would you close down your website if you couldn't update it, or would you leave an archive?
I dunno what the scenario is where I can take down my site but not change or rehost it, but I'd just leave it up.
97. Do you reveal a lot about yourself on your website? Or are you more secretive?
Yes and no. There's a lot of opinions on this site I wouldn't post on social media because it's not really my style to have a thread of 100+ film reviews or whatever, but there's also more going on in my life than what's written on these pages.
98. Are you willing to reveal who your best online friend is, and/or if they have a website?
No.
99. And do you optimise the images on your website?
Yes, in different ways depending on how they're used and how I think people will relate to them. For instance, the thumbnails in my manga/anime/comics trackers are shrunk-down 20%-quality WebPs because they don't need to be high-res and I don't think anyone's gonna want to download them—all that matters is they help remind me (or someone else looking at my tracker) of the artwork.
100. We're out of time! How do you feel after answering 100 questions? …other than exhausted.
It could've been fewer, but then I dunno if other people would focus on the same questions I did.