I’ve been syndicating a lot of posts from the Scout site here ever since I set it up, although lately I’ve cut back on just posting everything, and keep it to the highlights. Search engines get testy when you post the same content in multiple places (going back to the early days of porn spam) and deprecate your search rankings accordingly. I figured I’d better start playing ball a little better and added a custom field on that site for what’s called a canonical tag, where you add a little flag at the top of the page to let search engines know that they’re looking at the originating site. Then I went through the first year of syndicated posts and added the proper tag for each one. There are SEO plugins that do this automatically but I’m too cheap to be bothered—and frankly I don’t need more plugins gumming up the site. This will probably make no difference in the long run but it makes me feel a little better about my digital citizenship.

As usual, here’s some weblog data to close out 2023. There are 6,193 posts on the site as of December 31.

The first graph is splitting that number into category count totals for this past year. I’m working on a stacked bar chart version of this graph but I’ve got to finish the math up for the 2023 numbers.

And here’s the monthly post count. Looks like things are trending down slightly (that spike in 2005 is hard to match) but as usual the summer months tend to be higher than winter. This graph does not take into account the posting I’ve done over on the Scout blog, which has actually seen a lot of activity this year with red bus updates.

Ah, that’s better. I was getting tired of the way the sidebar links looked—my old sidebar plugin was retired last year so I had to scramble to find a new solution, and when that was implemented it added a bunch of extra CSS and code into that block of text. I finally dug into the code and found the right combination of selectors to override that garbage, and updated it to use the same font as the body copy in a more readable size.

As I write this I realize I haven’t updated the look and feel of this site in over ten years; the stripped-down template I’m using to base the whole site on has been working pretty seamlessly the whole time, with a few small caveats. Part of that is because the template is so basic, which is the main reason I chose it. I’d like to update the look and feel and do something different, but a huge part of me thinks about that project and just gets tired. I do miss working on the web in small doses, but the thought of a large-scale project doesn’t hold the same amount of professional challenge it once did. Were I to change the template, a couple of things I’ve considered doing are:

• Running the sidebar links inline in the main story feed with some kind of visual differentiator, so that they’re not pinned to the top of the page and appear in the main timeline
• Switching away from red and gray to something more soothing
• Cleaning up the comment listings
• Setting up the pages for better responsiveness on smaller devices—currently there’s a huge margin on the sides that’s more trouble than it’s worth to remove

Every out-of-the-box template I’ve seen is overcomplicated and usually geared towards some kind of storefront; the days of simple blog templates made for blogs is so far in the past as to be forgotten. I have little patience to figure out how to rip whole modules out of someone else’s convoluted templates, so here we sit.

That was pretty bizarre. I fixed a strange bug in the sidebar logic that was showing multiple other posts in the right column on archived post pages—for some reason the widget was feeding other posts into the “Interesting” feed that blew up the pages. I had to switch to a different plugin last year  (the old one was unsupported and woefully out of date) and I didn’t notice the single post pages were broken until a few weeks ago. Futzing with the logic, that widget is now suppressed on all pages except for the homepage.

During a long call at work where I was mostly listening, I did some housekeeping here at Idiot Central:

• I found a new plugin for sidebar posts and installed it, which means the shortlink categories are back up on the right side of the page. It required the addition of another plugin to work correctly—it’s what they call a “classic widget” and doesn’t work on WordPress 6.X without a backward-looking workaround. Not the best solution, but one that works.
• There was a bit of PHP I wrote at the end of each post which basically looked for any syndicated posts tagged “scout” and both changed the CSS to offset the post and added the explanatory block at the bottom, complete with direct links to that post on the Scout blog. When I updated the PHP engine behind the curtain to 8.0 a couple of months ago, my old code blew up so I had to find the issue there and fix that block.
• Finally, I wanted to remove the Flickr gallery at the bottom of the sidebar (I haven’t posted anything there in months) and replace it with Instagram; this took a couple of extra steps that aren’t in the documentation; what I had to do is hook up Instagram through Jetpack first and then link it up with the widget.
• I added a snippet of code to the functions.php file to supress any posts tagged “shortlinks” in the main feed:
  function exclude_category( $query ) {
if ( $query->is_home() && $query->is_main_query() ) {
$query->set( 'cat', '-30' );
}
}
add_action( 'pre_get_posts', 'exclude_category' );

  Where “30” is the category ID number. Because it’s within the main WordPress loop, it doesn’t affect the sidebar feed at all. A nice little hack that ensures I don’t need to add yet another plugin to do something dumb. Via this article.

I’ve been hosting photos here on the site pretty exclusively for the better part of the year. I used to use Flickr exclusively as my photo CDN, so almost every photo here from 2005 until this year is hosted there. Given all that’s been happening with external platforms coming and going, I’ve been thinking I need an automated solution to swap them out for local copies if and when Flickr ever goes away. I’ll have to look into how other people have handled that situation and if there’s a good script I can borrow.