If you are a reader or writer of fantasy, you know the rule that any magic system has to come with a cost. WordPress has a nifty thing called “plugins” which allow you to perhaps too-easily add features to your website. There’s a whole WordPress plugin repository where you can choose from over 50,000 different plugins to download and install for free.
Of course, they all come with ads for their “pro” version which offers extra features. But I am 100% on board with that — plugin developers need to earn money for what they do and their free versions let people try out some features before they know if the pro version will work for them.. But this isn’t about that.
The point that I was getting around to was that plugins are a bit like magic — they offer benefits but often come with a cost, some more than others.
When I’ve created a website for someone else, I add what’s needed and no more and I’ve had excellent results with fast websites. The problem is that I seem to want my website to be the Mary Sue of websites — that is, overpowered with ALL the features and none of the cost. Which is not realistic. Maps? Sure! Recipe plugin? Why not? A calendar in admin to keep track of all of the posts that I’m not writing now because the calendar plugin has slowed the admin area to a crawl? OK! I’m like a kid let loose in a toy store. But WordPress plugins are not toys! This is my inner mama speaking! Did I mention in was late at night now?
I’ve been using WordPress for a long time. I still cannot get over the tempation to keep adding “features” on to a website. I’ve questioned if it was just a way to avoid writing — but I ENJOY writing, photography, posting things. But adding to much has cost me greatly — in the sense that it has kept me at the desk much more than I would like and away from doing the things that drew me to blogging in the first place.
So I’ve had to consider what I actually want on this website and start to remove some things that were slowing the website down so I can get back to what I like doing most.
Chances are, this is your first time on this website. If not, you may notice some things looking just a bit different.
I won’t go in to great detail but I had to consolidate some headers and things that were customized for different kind of content to reduce queries to the database, if that makes any sense. And I’ve had to make the decision to remove some things that really weren’t needed.
Right now here are some things to keep in mind as you browse the website
- I’ve removed footnotes, due to conflicts with a plugin that would have me changing each and every occurence of them AND they were impacting site speed. I used to tend to write with copious amounts of footnotes so some posts may appear odd in certain places with symbols like this (()) or 1. I’m going through posts one by one to do some light editing but it may take a while to remove all these occurrences. For those in the know about WordPress, I am not doing this with a search and replace because, in some places, it would end in errors. (UPDATE — I keep updating this — I am bringing back footnotes with a different functionality. This will replace many existing footnotes, but there are some I’ll still need to fix by hand. For some things we would like to write, I find not having the ability to insert a footnote be…annoying).
- NOTE: this part was edited after the fact. I was going to remove the shop page and started to do so…but decided to keep it open at this time. But we’re starting over from scratch with what we’re listing and how we’re doing so. Stay tuned.
- I removed popups. In a few places where click to open information popups used to exist, they may not open anything until I can get to editing that page.
- I removed point systems and badges (but we are experimenting with how to re-implement this without a dramatic impact to how our admin area loads).
- We removed all sharing buttons except on certain gallery lightboxes. We found that while our sharing buttons used to get used, most people are sharing content now using the built in features of their mobile devices rather than website share buttons. I sort of liked how they looked, but they were one of those things that came with a cost with little benefit (other than showing that a few of our posts had a lot of shares).
- We removed the clickable shortlink at the post header. Also speed cost with little benefit.
- We removed the coffee cup post rating (NOTE Later: then we re-inserted it. We found that, though this makes a minimal impact on site speed, it was not the thing that was slowing our admin area and we like having the feedback and this way to do it, in particular. We recalled most of the ratings and have re-added existing ratings, at least as we recall them.)
- Because I’ve removed some features, some of the FAQs may be a bit out of date, but I will have to edit them as I get to them because I want to get outdoors and also back to adding content here.
- Because the ability exists and doesn’t really seem to exert and extra impact, I’ve added some groups and forums. While there’s already so much content online I don’t really expect that they’ll grow large, I like having forums for discussion and, at the very least, will offer another channel for subscription for people who don’t want to subscribe to email newsletters but want to keep posted on some types of content.
And what’s coming up? Here’s what I hope to do in the near future:
- Some PNW town profiles. Get back to writing about what we like. Local places. Occasionally travel. Doing things.
- Some videos, including some recent bike issues.
- More photo galleries.
- More photography posts.
- The first “quarterly” newsletter in a very very long time.
- AND we are trying to implement a way to at least offer some pay to guest authors for some types content. We originally wanted this to be a multi-author blog and initially had some guest authors, but went off the rails with other projects and things when the pandemic hit — which at this point was years ago. But we’ve dropped other blog and have realized we would like to continue this one.
Thanks again for visiting, and for sticking around if this isn’t your first time here.
Footnotes
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