The PolyBlog

I played and tested. Played and tested. Played and tested. Then I made some decisions, followed by more playing and testing.

In the end, I realized that the overly manual way I was doing things before was biasing me away from doing anything now. And such was the bias, I was falsely interpreting it as it preventing me from finishing, aka the new standard for seeing whether I keep doing something as part of a larger project. I finally decided to add 7 variables as custom fields.

But first, an unrelated but annoying problem

To avoid going into too much technical detail, I have a problem with my website regarding memory load. I am running a slightly higher-quality personal site option, but I’m not running anything that is commercial quality. And that means that I often find myself hovering between 25 and 40 workable plugins. Right now, I have 31 which starts to slow things down on the admin / back-end when I’m editing.

The new approach has me putting in seven custom fields. What I wasn’t expecting was to get into my second book review and find there were already about a hundred OTHER variables/fields already there, many with redundancies and duplicate entries, and virtually none of it useful. Some of it was remnants from the two moves of BRs from site to sites. Other remnants were from previously used plugins that I tested at various points; they added custom data, and when I deleted the plugins, they left data behind. Some of that was accidental and poor design; others were intentional so that the data would still show properly even without the old plugin running. Except that I had later deleted that part of the post, so it wasn’t needed any longer. A couple were Review plugins, others were social media link managers.

I am anal-retentive, so of course I thought I would simply delete the other fields. Except there’s no easy way to mark them and delete a bunch; you have to delete them one by one. No problem. Click. Wait for refresh. Click. Wait for refresh. Click. Wait for refresh. Each time was taking maybe 5-7 seconds each. Times 100 remnant fields, and you start to see the boredom.

I went looking for a plugin to help me manage it all, but most were just replacements, not ones that would manage the existing fields. You can do it through manual editing of the databases, but I try not to mess with the database directly. I found nothing useful. Sooooo, I gave up. I went along my merry little way, decided I didn’t care about the huge list of fields, and just added my new ones.

Except adding each one also took 5-7 seconds to add and refresh. Sigh. The first BR had NO remnants, but 2 through 10 did. Between testing and playing, some editing, giving up and just adding, it took me almost 2 hours to do the first 10.

Then I was doing something else, and some wording popped into my head. I didn’t want to bulk edit custom fields, I wanted to bulk DELETE custom fields. A bit of googling around WordPress options later, and bam, I found a plugin called WP Bulk Delete. When you first run it, it looks really scary as there are a whole bunch of tabs to let you mass delete pages, posts, etc. I definitely did NOT want to do that!

However, on the first page, it provided options to run a “cleanup” on the website’s fields across all pages and posts. It would delete a lot of unused fields, particularly duplicates (yay!), and a few other things. I made a backup and ran the cleaner. A large number of extra entries were killed. I went back into the first 10 BRs again, and voila, almost all of the old data was gone. My new data was still there, along with about 15-25 other items. Generally, five are tied to some formatting, another five for old social media links, and then another 10+ related to an old review plugin. Except now, when I click on those to delete? It deletes it and refreshes in under a second. Totally manageable.

I’m back in business, with a much cleaner digital workspace.

Which fields did I create?

I can already sort on publication date / date of the review. All of the posts are already set to the review date, even some old ones. For example, I have some reviews that I wrote in 1998, but I never got around to putting them online until 2010 or so. When I published them, I set the date of the post all the way back to 1998 aka when I first wrote them.

Because of the messed up dates above, only the recent posts show up in numerical order. I had published all of my archives by #200 or so, but up until then, some of the things I went back and posted had higher BR #s. For example, a post I wrote in 1998 that I didn’t post until 2010 could have had a BR # of 00067 — the BR Number is the order in which I posted them online. It is part of the title of each BR post, but I added a field so I could sort them in numerical order.

I mentioned in a previous post that I can already sort all the posts in alphabetical order, because all of the BRs start with the title. Except for a small niggly detail. A title like “A Purple Place For Dying” or “The Staked Goat” would show up in A or T respectively. To get around that, I added a field for title sort order. I said in my previous post that I wasn’t going to worry about that, but it turned out to be easy peasy, lemon squeezy. It takes less than 10s to add, so I went ahead and included it.

In a similar vein, the author’s name is buried in the title of the post, and can’t be accessed easily. Yet I might want to sort by author’s last name, so added a simple field. I made a small tweak to the info in the field though…if I have Jeremiah Healy as the author of say three books, I don’t just put healyjeremiah in the field — I tack on the year of the publication (1984, 1986, 1984, etc.) so that when I sort by last name, it will get to Jeremiah in the “Hs” for Healy AND list them in ascending chronological order.

One thing that I didn’t have on the website previously was any way to sort the better books aka those that I gave a 5/5 to, for example. I added a field for rating and it will now list all the ones from 5 stars down to 1 star.

The year of publication appears in the title, but I couldn’t sort on it before. In practice, it is more about seeing the oldest stuff that I’ve reviewed, or the newly published material.

I added a field for genre but I confess that I may have done that wrong for the setup. I initially only wanted to differentiate between Fiction and Non-Fiction. I have another “sort” that is a bit more genre-related, but I do that separately. I have two tabs, one for fiction (main) and a shorter tab for non-fiction. Perhaps I didn’t mess it up so much as misname it. I did it in part because I save my books digitally in two different libraries based on fiction or non-fiction, in fact, and I was mostly replicating that approach.

For genres, though, it is more often for me about series within a genre. For example, I created a field for Series but when I actually build the page for series, I have a whole bunch of sub-lists that are generated based on the name of the series. So far, the sub lists are:

• Standalone
• Action
  • Jack Reacher
• Criminal
  • Easy Rawlins
  • Keller
• Forensics
  • Dr. Temperance Brennan aka Bones
• Lawyer
  • Nina Reilly
• Police
  • Dutchman Historical Mysteries
  • Inspector Regal
• Private Eye
  • John Cuddy
  • Jeri Howard
  • Philip Marlowe
  • Jennifer Marsh
  • Sunny Randall
• Sleuth
  • Travis McGee
  • Barbara Simons
  • Hannah Trevor
• Spy
  • Amelia Pearce
• Thriller
  • Nelson Demille (not sure if I coded this correctly)
• Paranormal
  • The Mediator
  • 1-800-Where-R-You / Missing
• Star Trek
  • The Next Generation
  • Deep Space Nine
  • The New Frontier
  • Voyager

I’ve updated 40 or so book reviews to the new approach. Of the list, ten are ones that I COULD decide to expand and do something differently for genre. Decisions, decisions. It’s pretty easy to re-code ten if that’s what I want to do. And then all the various books would be separated by genre, even the non-fiction ones. Hmm…I’ll have to noodle on that one a bit more.

In the meantime, it all seems to work well so far. And with the majority of “extra” fields already cleaned up, it’s a much faster process now. Plus as I get more and more categories created, for the series/genre combo I mean, the faster the overall coding goes — if I code something new for Travis McGee for example, I don’t have to build the query into the list page; it’s already built and if I code a review as “travismcgee”, it auto-adds itself to that category.

Onward!