Back in 2005 when my husband (then partner) expressed anger with me when I tripped over a pair of boots in our bedroom and said, “you don’t even know how many boots you have,” that led me to learning “old-school” HTML coding and building my own website bootedman.com.

I began to catalog my entire boot collection. I began with my cowboy boots, then added my motorcycle boots, then added my work boots, and finished off the boots with displaying my dress boots.

Later, I added my biker gear and fetish leather gear.

Later still and as interests and fetishes changed, I added my dress shoe collection and men’s business suits.

Well, unfortunately…

… as I remained very, very, “old-school,” I did very little to learn modern coding techniques and refused to use a content management system (such as WordPress) since I thought (wrongly), “I know what I’m doing; this appears fine on my computer.”

I did make a few broad changes to try to make the site smartphone-friendly and change it to “https://” protocol, else google would refuse to index it.

I kept updating the website over the years, adding new boots, new shoes, removing items I sold or discarded, and otherwise tried to keep up my “inventory” to reflect my boot, shoe, and gear collections accurately.

But when a page wouldn’t render correctly, and I heard that AI is good at coding, I thought to ask AI to review my site.

Oh my… not that I am really surprised, but I was unhappy to get these results:

1) It’s using legacy HTML techniques. The Bootedman website is essentially a long-running personal site that dates back to the early web era and has been incrementally updated rather than rebuilt.

2) Likely “quirks mode” is rendering. If the page is missing a proper modern DOCTYPE, browsers switch into quirks mode, which: changes how widths/heights are calculated; breaks alignment and spacing; can distort tables and images; that alone can make a page look “off” or inconsistent across browsers.

3) Mixed or blocked content. Pages on older sites often embed images or scripts using HTTP instead of HTTPS reference external resources that no longer exist.

4) Deprecated or unsupported scripting (if any) if the page uses old JavaScript patterns (which mine does).

5) Encoding / character issues.

So what to do?

I am way beyond having enough patience or, frankly, interest, in learning modern coding. Further, there are literally thousands of pages on my site. Recoding all of them is beyond imagination. Further, I am “frugal,” (aka “cheap”) and don’t want to pay someone to recode all the pages for me.

If there is some software out there that can do this for me, I might consider that, but not hire a person or company to do that.

I’ll let the site be what it is, work or not-work as it may, and just rest easy without fretting over it.

I am open to ideas though from others with more knowledge than my own.