Site History
Every version of RouterJockey the Wayback Machine caught
I registered routerjockey.com on May 20, 2010, as the new home for my old tony.mattke.net blog. The site has been redesigned more times than I’d like to admit… so here’s every version the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine caught along the way. Old captures sometimes lost a stylesheet or an image, so a few look rougher than they did at the time.
- 2010 – 2014
The first theme
A white page with colored tabs across the top and a sidebar stuffed with a tag cloud and my Twitter feed. It ran almost untouched for four years.
Open on the Wayback Machine → - 2014 – 2017
Going dark
The first dark theme, and the first time the green showed up. A black sidebar carried the navigation and the tagline "a network engineering blog," which stuck around for another decade.
Open on the Wayback Machine → - 2017 – 2024
The laptop hero
A full-width photo of a laptop and a coffee mug, the tagline, and four social icons. The logo changed to the lowercase routerjockey wordmark in early 2023, and the photo stayed.
Open on the Wayback Machine → - 2024 – 2026
Neon, and the move to Hugo
The site moved to Hugo in January 2024 and got an illustrated neon workstation across the top.
Open on the Wayback Machine → - February – April 2026
Enter Claude
The first 2026 refresh, and where I started using Claude to design the site and manage the infrastructure behind it. A dark photo hero, with the latest post as a card underneath.
Open on the Wayback Machine → - April – June 2026
No more heroes
The hero images came out. A featured post across the top, then the TX BUFFER, a grid of post cards with a different color for every category. The rainbow didn't survive the next round...
Open on the Wayback Machine → - June – July 2026
Series take over the home page
The home page became a catalog of series, with a featured series up top and the learning series listed in reading order. The post feed moved to /blog.
Open on the Wayback Machine → - July – September 2026
A real design system
Exo 2 headlines, green brackets around the featured series, flat ruled lists in place of cards, and the site went dark-only.
Open on the Wayback Machine → - September 2026 – now
Stark black
The green glow and the film grain came out, and the background went to a neutral near-black. This is the version you're reading.
Open on the Wayback Machine →