This week has been pretty uneventful for the websites. I spent most of my time tweaking SEO-related stuff—things like reworking meta descriptions, adjusting lengths, and fixing some CSS to deal with CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift). Very boring, tedious work.
When I first built the CMS, I allowed image uploads in whatever format they came in—JPEG, PNG, GIF, etc. Later, I implemented a WebP conversion system, which is why I built the WebP converter in the first place, to learn how to do it. Once I got the code sorted out, I hardcoded the function into the backend so now it happens automatically for new uploads.
I could write a script to convert all the old images too, but I decided to do it manually instead. It gives me a chance to update older posts along the way. I spent most of today working on the older posts over at Stellar History. Some of those posts originally lived on Wisedocks years ago, so they're overdue for a refresh. Still got a ways to go, but I’m getting close to wrapping that up.
As for the CLS issues, I’ve fixed most of them on Stellar History, but Wisedocks still needs work. One big issue was with dark mode. I had a cookie that would remember if you were using dark mode, but it caused glitches whether you used it or not. I decided to scrap it for now, and that alone sped up the site noticeably. I’ll come back to dark mode later when I figure out a better way to handle it.
Another thing I’ll probably tackle tonight is the fonts. They’re almost as big as the rest of the website’s code and are slowing things down when the page first loads. I think I can speed things up by swapping out the current fonts for browser-friendly alternatives.
I also made a lot of small tweaks, like improving how I ping search engines after creating new posts. For now, I’ve only added this to Stellar History, but I'll eventually implement it on Wisedocks as well.
It’s pretty crazy when you think about everything that goes on in the background when creating a new post like this one. Once I hit submit, my code creates a title, sets the new URL, checks if the post is a draft or ready to publish, decides if it should appear on the homepage, sets the category and content, creates a summary, resizes and converts the featured image to WebP, pings search engines, updates the sitemap and RSS feed, and adds schema data for search engines.
It’s taken me over a year to get this process working smoothly, and I’m still improving it. Sometimes, I feel like every post needs to be a long one, but do I really need to?
I've been reading up a lot on SEO. If I want people to find this site, I need to rank well in search engines. I get decent traffic from social media, but it's a lot of work. Once I’m properly set up in search engines, I can focus more on content.
That said, I’m always worried my posts aren't long enough. But I don't see the need to write 2,000 words when 500 will do, especially for these blog updates. Sometimes, if I don’t have much to talk about, I end up rambling just to pad the word count. But honestly, I should just write shorter posts or split ideas into two separate ones.
I'm still not sure if Wisedocks will ever fully recover in search rankings. I've shuffled posts around so much over the years that search engines seem to have given up on me.
Speaking of that, I’ve spent a lot of time hunting down pages that have moved. I even built a script to log 404 errors so I can redirect them. A big issue right now is that many pages from FartDump were moved over to Wisedocks, and search engines are treating them as duplicate content. It’s like they think I stole the articles or images from myself. I’ve been setting up 301 redirects from FartDump to Wisedocks so search engines know it’s just a move. Hopefully, that’ll help Wisedocks bounce back in search results soon.
I used AI to generate the text in the quotes section. I’d ask ChatGPT for an article about someone, then copy and paste it, adding my quote images to the post. But now, I’m wondering if this approach hurt my rankings. Maybe it would’ve been better to just display the quotes in a gallery like I did with the AI images. Still, I like having the text there so you can read about the person behind the quotes. I might start going back through them and adding a more personal touch. We’ll see.
That’s about all I did this week, but that doesn’t mean I’m finished! I’m off to work on the fonts right now.
