If you’re a regular visitor to this blog you may have noticed a few changes over the past few weeks, most notably the addition of a new theme, new name, and updated home page.
I also created a new blog icon using Copilot, by describing my idea of a creative space.
Visible changes
The new theme is about giving the site a modern look and feel, as well as allowing me to make use of the enhanced editing ability of new versions of WordPress. This will give me more options to showcase my projects and interests. The new name is primarily about using the site as a portfolio of practice that’s explicitly linked to me, rather than a very geeky allusion to the Linux filesystem (I’d forgotten this but it’s not the first time I’ve renamed the site). And finally, the new home page is about drawing together all the projects I’m working on that are distributed across different online spaces.
Creating a portfolio
But the big change is much less visible (to humans); I’ve started updating all the post metadata and content, in an attempt to make it easier for search engines to ‘understand’ what the site (and my career) is about. Which is essentially what I’m trying to do with this website review; consolidate and make sense of my academic career to date, and to use this as a foundation to focus my scholarly direction for the next few years.
I should back up a bit. Until recently I’ve thought of this site as bit of a brain-dump for the things I’m busy with, and that I’m interested in. But I’ve realised that, with a bit more effort, it might serve as a portfolio of practice and scholarship. I want to reconfigure the site so that it’s a tighter, more structured, better organised representation of the work I’ve been involved in since I started working as an academic.
But there are more than 1600 posts on the site, collected over a period of 15 years, with little to no thought given to organisation and structure. Which essentially means that I’ll need to revisit each post and update it individually.
On the one hand this is going to be a huge hassle, mainly because of the time it takes to load and update each post. I briefly considered downloading the entire site, editing the XML file as an offline version of the site, and then importing it back into WordPress. But I’m worried about breaking everything. On the other hand, this might be an interesting reflective exercise, and opportunity to review the past 15 years of my academic activity.
Plans for technical changes
These are the bigger changes I have planned, focused on providing structure around the work I’ve completed since I started as an academic:
- Harmonise my use of Tags and Categories to provide some high-level structure to the site. I have 47 Categories with hundreds of posts in the Uncategorised category, and about 4500 tags (weirdly, some tags have never been used). And no guidelines about when to use a Tag or Category, many of which are duplicates. It’s a huge mess.
- Edit all SEO metadata for all posts. Very few of my posts include any SEO information, which effectively makes them invisible to search engines. I want to update as many of these posts as is reasonable.
- Improve content discovery. I want to make it easier to surface some of the older posts so that they’re more useful. I’ve started this by highlighting the main categories as Topics on the blog index page.
- Clearer distinction between my writing, and my comments on other people’s writing. I’m not entirely sure how I’m going to do this, but for now I’m thinking of putting my stuff into ‘Blog‘ and comments and links into ‘Notes‘. Having said that, I’m currently not happy with this arrangement.
- Related to this, I want to also differentiate between my ‘notes’ and what has become a replacement for my social media posts. I still want to share links to interesting resources but want to separate those out from the main blog channel.
- Make better use of Featured images and try to remove all that are purely decorative.
- Commit to including more long-form content in the form of essays.
- Highlight more of my own photos. I take lots of photos and want to showcase some of them here. I’ve started by consolidating multiple categories and tags, effectively creating a single Photography category. This will grow as I add more of the older posts that include photos, into the category.
- Fix broken image galleries. I don’t know how many posts have broken galleries but there are many.
This is a fairly big project and I expect it to take a few years for it to be an effective portfolio of practice. In the context of a website, that’s a long time. But in the context of me using this exercise as a way to figure out what the next phase of my career is going to look like, it’s no time at all.