You may have noticed that the blog hasn’t had a frequent, daily update for some time. Instead, I’ve been updating every other day and sometimes a few days in a row (like the last few days). As you’ll recall from an entry I uploaded in November, for the first year of Joe’s Journal and JerseySmarts.com being combined I was keeping to a one-post-each-day format to prove to myself that I can handle the increased pressure of having a single blog that continues to increase in popularity. I think I’ve accomplished that objective! Besides, I’m finding that as I put more time in some of these entries, they are garnering better search engine rankings and thus the website is getting more hits – which is always nice.
Some of you might be interested to know that I’ve been working on a lot of the behind the scenes elements of this website since our one year anniversary of merging back in November. Most of the stuff that I’ve been doing is boring, but some of it might be interesting to at least a few of my readers. So here is a short list of what I’ve been up to lately.
- Random HTML Updates: As always, I am obsessive about the cleanliness of the code that is used to create JerseySmarts.com. The WordPress people are great at releasing frequent updates to the blog’s core structure, but I make a great deal of changes and modifications to that structure that I am always going back to tinker with and clean up. I told you this was boring, right?
- Automatic “Strong” Links: This one is really a personal preference, but I like to have the ability to control the appearance of the links in my entries. WordPress is very flexible when it comes to this, but sometimes it is not very clear on how you manipulate the code for these options on the back end. I’ve had some success with a quick, easy workaround on some of the other WordPress-based websites that I own so I decided to institute them here and it has been working very well. Which brings me to the next point…
- Amending Older Posts & Comments: When I merged both sites last year, I brought everything from both sites over to the new system. As those of you who work with me on websites know, I’m a stickler for maintaining content – I hate deleting ANYTHING from a website! However, I do understand the need for content to be correct. To this end, I spent some time the other day amending all of my old comments on this blog to reflect the new URL of JerseySmarts.com instead of the old URL for Joe’s Journal which was based off of the now defunct thebalrogslair.com website. That took some time… And while I was at it, I also amended my buddy Eddie’s comments to reflect his new blog URL as well as my other friend Martin’s comments to reflect his new blog URL. Having the proper URL out there is cyberspace is important to generating hits and interest in your website – you can’t let that stuff fall by the wayside.
There have been a few other things that I’ve done in the last few weeks that really begin to dig into the minutiae of operating a website so I won’t bore you with them. Just know that on those days when there is not a new entry for you to read, chances are I am working on something else behind the scenes that is, in the long run, just as important as new content!
