Public / Professional

Are you all familiar with the myth that humans only use 10% of their brains? It’s total nonsense, and if you stop to think about it for a minute it’s obvious why. Why would the human brain evolve to have so much complexity if it was largely superfluous? Inefficient or redundant organs held over from previous evolutionary stages aren’t unheard of, but I would expect that doesn’t usually apply to neurological functions as those seem to only expand their capabilities as more develop and communicate with each other.

Whatever. I’m no neuroscientist. Likewise, no shame on you if you ever bought into that myth. Lord knows I’ve made similar mistakes. Anyway, I’ve been kinda feeling like that this week. I’ve been complaining a lot about WordPress’s unintuitiveness — which I largely stand by — but I feel like I’ve made enormous strides in quick succession with regards to understanding the WP builder’s architecture.

As such, I’ve applied what I’ve learned to make sweeping changes to my site in short order. Or rather, as short an order as I can muster. The most immediately impactful change for readers will be my migration of “pages” to “posts”. This will make some previous permalinks nonfunctional, but that’s one of the pitfalls of the learning process.

Why am I doing this? Visibility and accessibility. Pages can’t have categories or tags, which influences my site’s reach via common browsing methods as well as readers’ ability to navigate my site therein. When I began, I saw “posts” as a function exclusive to live, off-the-cuff blogging, but realized embarrassingly late that I had the power to distinguish as many post types as I want. In my defense, I recall WP overwhelmingly pushing the premise onto me at the start that “posts” were meant for blogging. So I put my reviews etc. on “pages”, pushing them down in various feeds and search algorithms. Not exactly conducive to site growth.

As inconvenient as this may be to some, no one hates it more than me. I have to manually copy and paste each page into a post format. That might not sound like much, but I have to customize my WP Patterns for each medium, update personal metadata, and update site metadata. I’m creating many categories and tags for the first time, so that also can take a while. I have to consider carefully how I want things to be organized in the final product. What do I call certain genres? Do I bother grouping “2D Platformer” and “3D Platformer” together? What functionalities would a reader use that would most likely be impacted by these decisions? There’s a lot of thought that goes into these choices, and they can spring up at any time amidst the more tedious aspects of conversion.

I’m even organizing the backend. Definitionally, you all don’t see this. I’m referring to how Blocks are organized in the WP Builder and their hierarchy. I’ve spotted some redundancy in some of my old layouts and Patterns as I learn, and I correct those as I go. Even if the results aren’t necessarily perceptible by readers, it contributes to a concise workspace that’s conducive to faster content output and quicker troubleshooting.

All of this is worth it, though. The first results I’d like to talk about pertain to the home page’s live content feed. Namely, the fact that it’s actually live now. I found out how to create a Query Loop just for reviews instead of blog posts. Before this, I had a system for manually entering images, links, and text for each review. What a pain! Now it’s all automated. Unless I decide to alter the general style, the only input required from me is the addition of “excerpts” to briefly describe the content. I’ve been adding these, and I’ve enjoyed the challenge of being concise yet enticing for them.

Another now-automated process is the content lists. The directories for each medium are currently still Pages, but their main Block was previously a List Block I manually updated and hyperlinked. I found out how I could display an automatic alphabetic list of everything attached to a specific Category. For instance, I just tag every post about a video game with the “Video Game” category, and the automated list does the rest once I provide the parameters and display preferences. Less work for me.

Functionally, these should work about the same. The biggest difference for readers would be the addition of thumbnails. These are new as of last night, and currently only apply to the manga and video game directories. I debated a lot over the thumbnail size, so feel free to let me know what you think. If there’s any downside to this automated list method, it’s that it appears I have less creative control over the appearance. For the most part that’s insignificant, but I do wish I could align the list text to the center of each thumbnail. It doesn’t seem like that’s possible. Oh well.

I’d also like to talk about publication dates. I’ve mentioned many times before that I’m compiling content from across my web presence, so articles can go back as many as ten years. While importing content, I’ve kept a manual metadata field on each Page containing the original publication date. This is both to keep a record of my personal history as well as establish some kind of expectations of my content. If someone sees a work is say, ten years old, they may be more understanding of the quality being different from articles posted more recently. I only see benefits to disclosing this info. I could have chosen to not publish older works I considered to be of lower quality, but I felt it would go against the primary goal of this site. This is a record of my experiences, warts and all. Eliminating any content is tantamount to wasted time for me, and I loathe nothing more than wasted time.

So, that content stays. And it stays with the expectation that I could revise and refine it at any time in the future. That brings its own conundrum: what would I consider to be such a significant revision that the content effectively becomes unrecognizable from the original? In those cases, I would be compelled to update the publican date to reflect it being written with a more recent mentality. I’ve actually already done this with a few articles. Hajime no Ippo: The Fighting! and Kirby’s Dream Land 3 were revised to such a degree that both their new syntax and rhetorical strength rendered the previous writings obsolete. I set those publishing dates to the day I revised them, but contained the original publication dates in the Post’s metadata Block to provide the genesis for what ultimately became those works. The thoughts contained within those articles are technically years in the making, and I want the records to reflect that.

There’s another consideration for this: WP appears to favor putting more recently published works in people’s feeds. That’s fine, but it’s a conflict of interest for my niche situation. Despite many of these reviews being old, them being from other sites means I never received that visibility I would have received from publishing on WordPress to begin with. I want visibility and site traffic, so I’m incentivized to publish those with recent publication dates to push them to the top of feeds. But do I misrepresent my site’s overall quality by pushing something too dated to the top? At the very least, I misrepresent my writing chronology. Anyone who wants to reference my history will now have works displayed out of order, which can present continuity errors whenever I reference my personal life etc.

So what do I do? Eat the loss of hypothetical views? I could. It would be “honest” in a way. But the rat race is brutal, and I know I need to take advantages where I can get them. It’s not like I’d be using any of the systems in bad faith, anyway. For WordPress’s audience, this will be new material for them. I could do a “stealth” approach: publish a work with a modern date, then after a day or two edit the Post data to reflect the original publication date from when it was on another platform and when I actually wrote it. I might do that. Would be kind of annoying though. Especially to do it with everything. I have hundreds of articles. In all likelihood, I’ll probably follow the trend set by the two previously mentioned articles and just gradually update relevant works as I continue to publish entirely new ones. I wish there was a way to push my posts to the top of feeds without compromising my automatic Feed chronology, but I don’t know of a way to do so.

Speaking of, I accidentally put this into practice on Friday when I forgot to put the original publication date down for my review of Shaman King. I woke up to four new visitors and two of them went on to view one other page. The system works! Or doesn’t! I don’t know. I corrected the date, in any case.

If that mistake wasn’t enough, I also briefly published this blog post a day early thinking it was Sunday when it was actually Saturday. I normally write these day-of, and my temporal failure caused me to get ahead of the game. For shame. I ended up making two more style changes to discuss, anyway.

I’m now automating the date display on pages. I found out you could do this both for the original date and the most recently modified date. This suits most of my purposes, but has problems when it comes to nuance. As I mentioned above, I don’t move up publication dates unless I make significant edits to the article. When I do this, this changes the automatic date display to reflect the “new” original publication date. In essence, I lose the record of when that article’s content actually began. There doesn’t appear to be any way to have multiple date fields with assigned descriptors, so I would have to record things like these manually. No big deal, except for the fact that I would have to enter them in a new Block since they’re not part of the Template. This creates an extra text box on the final page, with the requisite white space padding out pages even further.

I made the difficult decision to just deal with this for now. I’ll preserve significant dates when I can, even if it doesn’t look appealing, until I find a better solution. I also lose the ability to write notes for myself, such as reminders to verify presumed publication dates, because you can’t type page-specific info into a Template Block. The reason I made these changes is because the manual entering of dates and insertion of Patterns containing the Blocks I enter those into ends up taking a significant amount of time during importing. I have so much work to do that I sacrificed my neuroses to cut some of it down. As a perfectionist, it drives me nuts. But I think this is for the best in the long-term.

After this, it occurred to me that I could apply my basic Post aesthetic to a Template Content Block. I’m referring to my current style of having text on a grey background like you’re reading now. Applying this to the Template completely erases my need to insert any Pattern for an article Post other than the media metadata Block. The only Posts to entirely have a metadata Block right now are those under the video games directory where I note things such as release dates, alternate names, etc. This does have the unintended side effect of applying the grey background to the back of the metadata Block as it’s part of the Content Block in the Template, but I see no way around this right now. Again, I consider it a worthwhile tradeoff for cutting down on the import workload. I’ll look for other options as I continue learning the WP builder.

Anyway, that should cover the major revisions. I’m excited to get back to work after I publish this Post. You can navigate using the header buttons to check out the progress I’ve made. As of writing this, only the video game and manga directories have been fully reformatted. But over the coming weeks, more and more of the site will be converted. Not to mention I still have considerable importing to do when it comes to music, film, and manga reviews, and I’ll be doing more of those alongside these revisions. Since I work every day, checking back every day under all of those directories is the best way to keep up. For major article revisions or new content, just check the main page feed. Let me know if anything doesn’t function the way you would expect it to. Otherwise, thank you for your patience as I continue improving my site.

Personal

I recently completed Pokémon Ultra Moon Version, which means I have now caught up on every Pokémon generation. Hooray. I wish I could say I was free, but there’s still some extra content I want to experience among the games I’ve finished, and maybe even some odd entries I still want to check out. Not to mention any reviews I may end up writing. May Mawile protect me.

I’m trying to keep up with Master Duel and Duel Links. The former dropped the Melodious support which I really want, but FoMO has me by the balls (almost literally?) when it comes to getting the Evil Twin alternate artwork cards. The evil bastards actually upgraded their rarities from SR to UR, and after 4 or 5k gems I’ve only managed to snag two copies of Pink Girl. She’s my favorite of the two, but still. Cut me a break. And they just dropped another set with White Woods and Trickstar! It’s times like these I most wish that I had steady employment.

Duel Links is in a similar state. I only play Rush Duels there, pretty much. A recent set dropped that supports nearly every single deck I play. To make matters worse, I had no idea it was coming and spent my savings of 7k gems the day before it dropped. It was on the Rush sets for the Warrior support, another favorite deck of mine, so it could be worse. But still. What luck.

Other than that… Not much to say, I reckon. Most of my free time has gone to this site. I love that, but still. I’m replaying Banjo-Kazooie with my girlfriend (and to her reading this: I love you), and I’m 100%ing Tooie for the first time with two of my friends. That’s been fun, though between Thanksgiving and me getting mildly sick the progress has only recently resumed. I messed around a bit with Nintendo Switch Online’s addition of Donkey Kong Land 1 and 2. They’re a bit terrible. But interesting. Very tantalizing review targets, those.

Arrrrgh! I want to get back to working on my site! I’m out of here. If you actually read this whole post, thank you. You’re a true gamer. Feel free to contact me with any questions or opinions you may have on my content or the site changes. Take care. Brush your teeth. Floss too.