I’m sure my wife saw the post title and started social distancing just for that. “Not again!” was likely her thought. It’s true, I do play with some stuff on the site, often figuring out new ways to do something, and since I’m anal-retentive, I hate the thought of something that leaving previous versions if, say, I find a better way to do book reviews that I would implement starting now.

Simple content areas

Most of my content is relatively straightforward — a blog post here, a blog post there. For each, they are pretty text-heavy even if the popular website wisdom is more graphics and video. That’s not me, I’m a writer, I write words. But there are a few areas where I feel the choices for how to display the text are not quite so clear; for the simple areas, it is relatively, umm, simple.

For astronomy, I share my own pics of course, but I’m also writing an astronomy guide. So having a simplified layout that is easy for anyone to read is important to me. Mostly so far it is only a table of contents and a series of early pages or blog posts. I can do them as either (post or page), really, but most are done as pages.

For my challenges (reading, baking/cooking), they’re relatively simple static pages.

For materials related to government, much of it is simply one-off posts, no real structure required. But then I have two other areas…the first is PS Transitions FP, a report from a conference that a group of students from Carleton organized in 2002, and for which I was the webmaster. It’s entirely static, but it does have some tabbing in it, as well as a photo gallery. I’ve kept the content there for over 18 years, but the methodology for doing so has had to be altered a little bit when plugins expired, or setups on my site changed.

The other area is my HR guide, and it has been a challenge more for organizing than content, at least in terms of the website portion. I have multiple versions of some of the content, with a LOT of comments on pages that I now consider archival. I hesitate to delete them and lose all those comments, but I don’t like having the old versions of the guide there when I’ve written later and better versions. I recently found a plugin that will let me move comments from an old post to my latest post on the same topic, and I’ll likely consolidate it all when I get my latest version of the guide finished. My wife is acting as my editor, so I’m hopeful it will be my best version yet. And then I’ll likely delete all the other content. The thought makes me queasy, to be honest. All those words, used extensively by people, but I’m going to delete entire posts and pages? I haven’t worked through that mentally yet. I might find a way to preserve it somewhere else on the site.

Under personal, I have posts about family and goals, all relatively straight-forward. But the ones for humour and quotes give me pause. I like the idea of sharing both through social media as memes. And then including them on my website. Sounds simple, right? Except if I do it as a meme, i.e. a graphic, then the graphic doesn’t get indexed on my site. Index bots don’t read the “text” within the graphic, it is just the graphic. So if I add a long joke, or even a short quote, and someone was to search anywhere for it, my site wouldn’t show up in the search engine because technically that text doesn’t appear on my site. Yet, by the same token, if I post it as text, it doesn’t look as sharp as a meme, suitable for sharing. Someone suggested including both, but that seems redundant. However, I might have a new way to at least create a searchable list of the description of the meme at least. A bit manual to create at first, but ongoing would be simple to update for future posts.

The more difficult areas to format

The real challenge has always been my reviews. Before I even had a website, I wrote book and movie reviews and just shared them along with jokes to a subscription-based newsletter list. It was free, but you had to “ask” to be on it. I had book reviews, movie reviews, jokes, and an active trivia game at the time. Most of it was in a spreadsheet that handled all my formatting in ASCII format so I could paste into an email and just pressed SEND. It worked, I liked it, and when I created my first PolyWogg website, I wanted to put my reviews there.

Of late, though, I have mostly focused on book reviews. I generally have liked the format for them (plot / premise, what I liked, what I didn’t like, bottom line, rating), and yet I confess it took me several tries to get them looking the way I wanted. One of the early challenges was whether or not I include a “disclosure” phrase in the review on my own website. You’re supposed to declare any conflict-of-interest elements if you post reviews on a lot of commercial sites, and since I share them on those sites too, it seemed simple to also include them on mine. But over time, I realized I didn’t really care. For almost none of them do I have any conflict. I don’t have that many cases where I got a free book / advanced reader copy to read. So the disclosure was bulky and just said that I had no link to the author. Kind of meaningless in the long-run. I cut it.

Then Amazon started playing with how they handle referral links. I didn’t have a lot of links on my site, and so I wasn’t getting any referral money. I think I got about a dollar over five years. But I did have the account, and the main point of having it was so I could link to the Amazon website and hotlink in pictures of the book covers. Yet Amazon booted me from the active referral program along with 1000s of other affiliates who hadn’t earned any commissions in the previous year. They culled the list, so to speak, and I would have cut me too. But that called into question my hotlinking, which also required me to run two extra plugins. Could I get the images some other way? Yep, Good Reads grants permission to those doing reviews to link to the images on their own site. Yes! So I went through probably 150 or so book reviews, reformatting a few things as I went (like cutting disclosure paragraphs) and updating all the images. Tedious, but they were all “fixed” to match the new approach. That was about six months ago.

The part that was “left” was my index of book reviews. I had tried some indexing tools, some table plugins, a few other things, and none of them really worked the way I wanted them to do. Because I had different types of info that I wanted to be able to group by:

1. Alphabetically by title (obvious);
2. Alphabetically by author;
3. The raw review number (i.e., mostly chronologically for me for the order in which I write the reviews);
4. The date of my review (where #3 failed is some of my reviews are old and I’ve updated them and included them, but that means putting in a 1998 review in between two 2015 reviews, for example, so #3 and #4 are not exactly the same sort);
5. The year the book was published;
6. Series and order, to give me the ability to group books in the same series; and,
7. My rating.

But without the proper tool to display all of that, I organize it manually. I still use a flat-file database in a spreadsheet, Excel currently, although it started off in Lotus 1-2-3 years ago, and in the spreadsheet, I have a field that formats the info so I can simply paste it into my website. For example, I mix and match sub-fields into a single string that says:

TITLE by AUTHOR (BR#####; published {date}; reviewed {date}; series {order}; rating)

I then simply paste that into one page, add a hotlink to the URL for the review post, and then copy that to six other index pages. I have tended to do it in batches of twenty-five book reviews at a time, so I would write 25 reviews and post them over the course of a number of months, and when I got to the 25th, I would then paste all 25 strings into a web-page, add the URLs, and then paste them into the other six pages too. Time-consuming, and doing 25 together made it a bit more efficient on workflows, but it was a workflow blockage too. Plus, once in awhile, I’d mess up some link or a copy and paste, and then a year later, I would happen to notice that the link from one of the indices was not, in fact, linking to the right page. I’d messed it up, and when I beta-tested it, I had apparently missed the errors. REALLY annoying. Another downside to coding some things manually.

As I said, though, I had tried out a bunch of options to put it into various auto-sorting tools, but it never worked well.

An accidental revolution

In addition to my book reviews, I also do movie reviews, music reviews (although mainly only one year so far), and TV reviews. For the TV reviews, it is INCREDIBLY slow to do a review of a full season of TV for me. Which is odd, because the individual episodes are ALREADY reviewed. As I watch TV, I keep track of individual episodes and when I finish the episode, I use a similar spreadsheet to automate a quick TWEET that says:

ShowTitle – S(eason)##E(pisode)## – EpisodeTitle – QuickOneLineReview – RatingOutOfFive

Sooo, I have always wanted to embed those reviews in my website, but didn’t have a good way to do that, at least not quickly. I tried a manual approach:

• Created a table in a reusable post template;
• Added a line for the Tweet;
• Added a line for a picture from the episode (I was saving them for a while);
• Added some areas to talk about the overall season;
• Added an area to rate the whole season;

But then I was stuck. That is a LOT of copy and pasting to get it to look right. I tried just pasting from Excel spreadsheets, but the paste is painful — it adds codes to EVERY cell, so if you want to adjust layout later, the whole table is a mess of codes. So I went looking for a way to embed an Excel Spreadsheet into a website easily. Just so I could paste, for example, a whole season’s worth of tweet/reviews at once.

And I found the very popular plugin for WordPress called TablePress. It would allow me to import spreadsheets directly or even to paste them raw. Gave it a try, and BAM, it worked right out of the box. Great, I had a way to paste the whole season at once into a page.

But then I noticed some other features. It would let me search the table too, applying the terms like a filter. Not really needed in a table of only 20-25 rows, but interesting. Oh, and you can sort columns too. Again, I don’t really need that with the episodes.

Or more accurately, I don’t need that function for THIS table. But what about my book review indices? Holy Hannah, I could have ONE table instead of 7 and EVERY FIELD is sortable? Plus I can paste directly from Excel? Holy fudgicles!

Welcome to the revolution

I only had 8 reviews of TV seasons, all for the show Castle that finished a few years ago. Again, as I said, too time-consuming to paste in every episode line by line, particularly if I was also pasting in photos. Meh. Instead, I’ve cut it down to an overview, episodes that I liked, those that were watchable, those that I didn’t like, a table of all the episodes, an overall review of the season, and some links to the index of other reviews.

With each column sortable. I copy the rows and columns from Excel where I already have the info, paste it all into the back end, add one line to my page, and BAM!, instant table. I started thinking, okay, this is good, I’ll do a table for each season, no problem. But then I thought again. Every table will be identical in format. And Castle has 8 seasons, that’s 8 tables to keep in the database with different names, I’ll need a good naming convention, etc. Hmm…but what if I could merge ALL of the Castle episodes into one table and just list those that correspond to Season 1. Is that doable? Turns out it is. TablePress has a premium extension called row filtering. So now I have pasted ALL of the info for each episode for eight seasons of Castle into the same table, and now instead of saying just “show Castle table”, I also say “filter to S01”. Still all one line.

Now I could get really aggressive, and paste all my shows into one database. Dozens of shows, hundreds of seasons, maybe even thousands of episodes and then filter on “Castle” and “S01”. Yet it would generate a HUGE table in the database. If it corrupts, I’m toast, I’ll lose everything, plus it would be loading the whole table each time it ran a filter. For TV episodes at least, I’ll keep it to one table per show. But once I’ve pasted one season in, the rest can go like gangbusters. A huge workflow saving, and it generates the same way every time.

And it got me thinking about how to do the book reviews.

As I mentioned earlier, I had 7 pages of book review indices generated relatively manually. Now they could be all in one page. Great! Except that all of my existing book review pages have a small table at the end of each that has links to each of the seven pages. All nicely formatted; all no longer needed. In 180 book reviews. The ones I updated 6 months ago to fix the problem with showing the pictures of the book covers. Dang it.

Editing Book Reviews

It really isn’t as bad as it sounds, maybe an hour or two of dedicated processing to open the page, go to the bottom, paste a new line that only links to the main index, and then delete the table for the rest. Easily doable. There likely is a way to do this in the block editor to prevent ever having this need again (i.e. perhaps I could edit the block next time and delete or update all of them at once), but I am not a block-editor kind of guy. I vastly prefer the simple classic editor. So that’s what I’ve done. But I went through my layout in detail asking myself if there is ANYTHING else I might want to change as I go. My ratings show as pictures of a frog reading on a lilypad, and if it is four out of five, it shows four green ones and one grey one, for instance. On all of my other reviews, TV / Movies / Music, I’m switching my ratings from an actual graphic file over to a simple icon / emoji of a smiling frog. So four green frogs and one grey circle, for 4/5. It looks simpler, shows up cleaner in tweets and FB, kind of cute. I like the branding. But for my book reviews, I like the graphic of the frog reading. So I am committing to that staying. I’ll use the frog emoji in tables, like above, but for the rest, it is graphics.

While I was playing with this, I also adjusted my movie reviews, even though for that too there are only a handful. Too hard to do the workflow, or so I thought. Now that I have an easily updatable table, it’s not that bad.

My other big tweak

A few months ago, I started the process of switching all of my photos from a separate Piwigo install on my website into a WordPress-based NextGen Gallery that embeds all the photos into the site. The integration is great, but it is a LOT of work to move 13K photos from one server area to another. I’m fixing a whole bunch of stuff on the back end as I go, including how filenames and captions, plus face tagging, are done, and I’m using Mylio as by desktop photo processor along with its built-in facial recognition. That has a small impact on my movie and TV reviews as I do include some photos for those (like the show’s title screen and a pic or two from an episode somewhere in the season). It’s working well, but I’m a bit stalled on the “big” move. Still a LONG way to go on the regular personal photos, not to mention astronomy photos later. Yikes.

Conclusion

And that’s where I am. TablePress as a major change, plus its extension for filtering + I’ve reformatted the entire approach to reviews + I’m using a new gallery plugin on the backend. But I’m really happy with the approach, for the first time in a long time. I feel like there aren’t any niggling elements on any of the review contents, or the others really, where I don’t have the approach I want. No “unresolved” issues like manually having to do multiple index pages rather than having the system generate it for me.

Yay me!