The Chronicles at 25

by Anton Zuiker on May 12, 2025

This coming July, the Zuiker Chronicles will have been online for 25 years.

I last updated the look in 2015, so clearly the site needed a refresh. Over the last year, I’ve been reviewing CSS frameworks, testing new fonts, studying the ways Textpattern has evolved, and deciding which parts of the site to keep and which to change.

Logo

First up was the logo, and in February I unveiled a new brand. The Zuiker Family totem, the raven, has served this site well for 25 years, but I wanted to focus on an animal that has been meaningful to me and my children: the sea turtles of St. Croix and the Eastern box turtles here on our own property inspired our new brand. They love it.

CSS

My next decision was which CSS package to use. The State of CSS annual developer survey was a great resource and I looked at a dozen of the options. I really like Pico. However, years ago I found Mustard and liked the look and feel of that—especially the Steppers component. The developer who created Mustard lives in Raleigh although he’s not actively changed the framework. Turns out it was fine just as he left it. I even learned how to compile with Sass so my stylesheet has only the components I need for the site.

Then, fonts

Ning, the designer for the brand, recommended I move away from Concourse and Equity (thanks for a decade of service, Matthew Butterick!). I’d become a member of the SimpleBits Secret Type Club so I had use of all the cool typefaces by Dan Cederholm. Ning and I decided Paint Factory would be good for page and post headlines, but when I started to code the site, Wilco Loft Sans felt better (and its Chicago connection matched the family history, too). Secondary headlines are in Bitter (I also bought the super fun Robots font from that Argentine studio). Body text is Figtree.

Textpattern, of course

Zuiker Chronicles Online has been on the Textpattern content management system since 2005. There was no doubt that I would keep using it. I am indebted to the volunteer developers who have improved and expanded the CMS through the years (building on Dean Allen’s initial gift to us). On top of that, the Txp Forum is one of the most civil, positive, affirming places on the Web, and I salute the Txp community.

I’m especially grateful for the developer preview that’s now built into Textpattern. Without this design-and-test functionality (and Nova, the code editor I used to test my initial page layout ideas), I’d surely still be working on this relaunch well past the July anniversary.

The result

Yesterday I flipped the site over to the new design. I feel incredibly proud of this, satisfied with the focus and dedication and learning it took for me to accomplish this, grateful for the resources I have to do this, and humbled by the talented and caring people in my family, my community, and all around me.

In addition to the new look, there are a few changes to the site I want to mention.

Zuiker Chronicles Online long ago became my personal blog. I wanted to keep the page structure simple. I struggled to find a good way to include site navigation, and so I decided to emulate Jim Nielsen, who offered a creative way to present the navigation. Nielsen uses flat files, and Txp is dynamic, but I found a way to make a Menu for my site. It does force an extra click or two, but it keeps the rest of the site cleaner. We’ll see how it ages.

On mobile devices, the brand at the top of the page is just the turtle logo. That means there’s no visible name to the site. That’s ok; just start reading.

I used to have a Now page to reflect my main activities each month—family, work, house, soccer, writing—but I have moved that over to my personal page at antonzuiker.com, which serves as my brief bio and resume.

The About page is shorter but still honors Frank the Beachcomber.

I updated the Books page to better highlight my dad’s memoir, my grandpa’s autobiographical novel, an uncle’s book about hiking in Arizona, and, I hope, others to come.

There’s now a proper footer to the page. Note the link to the offsite family tree, which will be a next project to get that looking better and with more genealogy.

That Steppers component? I used it for the Changelog page, a new feature to give a timeline of key changes to this site and to recognize the artists and others who have helped me make this site unique through this last quarter century. To make that timeline complete, I dug up the original files for the very first web pages I had uploaded to the small Internet service provider in Northern Ohio.

And with that full circle, I thank each and every one of you who have come to this site, whether once or twice or over and over, to read about the Zuiker Family and how we chronicle our time on this amazing planet.

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