Changes to Categories and Listings

I’ve been tinkering with the site and made some changes I want to tell you about.

Rose Guastella has been posting her artwork on Et Cetera instead of Graphic Arts. That made a lot of sense to me because, for one thing, I haven’t built a category page for artwork yet.

That got me thinking. We don’t have enough content in Digests, Graphic Arts, Fiction, Poetry, or Music to justify building separate pages for those categories. I decided to dump that content into Et. Cetera.

As a result, everything in those categories will appear in Et. Cetera until such time that we have enough content to support additional pages.

For now, I would like to encourage you to use the specific categories – Digest, etc. – when posting that type of material. That way, when Et. Cetera becomes overloaded with content, I will be able to break up the category by creating new category pages.

THE SIDEBAR EXPERIMENT

I’ve also been tinkering with the sidebar, which is pretty obvious, I guess. The three sections – Recent Comments, Most Read, and Grab Bag have a couple of differences. The Recent Comments plugin does not allow me to adjust the size of the icon.  The Most Read/Grab Bag plugin does not allow me show the author’s name. I had another plugin that did that but the plugin doesn’t seem to be working anymore so I had to replace it.

Looking for feedback about the color scheme. I am using those bright colors to spruce up the pages but perhaps I should have been conservative and used shades of gray. The point is to attract the eye toward additional content.

Comments?

Author Archives

I am in the process of building out Author Archive Pages, one for each contributor, that will list all of your posts in chronological order, most recent first. The existing member pages are a pain in the ass for several reasons, both for the users and for me, so this seems like a better approach.

When you get an email from me with a link to your Author Page, please send me a discernable headshot (Kosh, I’m looking at you) and a brief biographical sketch.  Also, if you want an option that will allow you to view your content in alphabetical order, please express that preference to me and I will see if I can do that.

Remember that the author archive pages will only work if you remember to put your byline in tags and – PLEASE – don’t add any other tags to your posts. Tags do nothing to draw search engine attention because the algorithm is heavily biased to favor posts with the most clicks on them and posts coming from the most heavily trafficked sites. I’ve tested this out a number of times and I always get the same result. Nothing.

Someone asked me why I have to keep tinkering with the site. If I don’t do that, I will eventually forget how to fix the site when it breaks. Better to keep in practice.

Milner