Goings-On

Having a bit of a weird time, with lots of low and some … not highs really, just oks. I had really slipped into just being miserable all day, so I’ve started getting my shit together a bit and doing some stuff, even if I don’t feel like it, and it’s helped some. I’ve also decided to make a therapy appointment but I can’t just do that without putting it off for a few weeks to get used to the idea.

SEO and faffing with wordpress plugins

(I talk about plugins that only work with WordPress.org self-hosted blogs, but if you google wordpress.com SEO there are some tools you can use, that seem easy to use)

I came across this post: 10+ ESSENTIAL (AND FREE!) BLOGGING TOOLS TO GROW A SUCCESSFUL BLOG from Marie at Drizzle and Hurricane Books while blog hopping last week. True to form I completely ignored most of the helpful tips and instead hyperfixated on one: Search Engine Optimization. Now I don’t know enough to understand how that works, but it does, I’ve been using Yeost SEO since June 2020, and in Dec-Jan I did a big batch of optimising posts. Both these times my views from search engines about trippled, and they started making up more and more of my total blog views. I even made a graph:

June-July-August I’ve been pretty low on blog activity, and the last time I’d done WordPress SEO stuff had been May, so it’s been going strong even without me doing anything.

Marie mentioned a new plugin, Rank Math, which oh boy a rabbit hole. It has lots of stuff I haven’t figured out how to use yet, but it gives me pretty stats and charts (or, I hope it will give me those, they’re mostly not populated with data yet)

So I spent a large chunk of yesterday and today optimizing and reoptimising my posts, a lot of the ones I had previously done I just had to refresh and save. I don’t SEO all of them, just the ones I think might be interesting.

Now I’m gonna spend the next few months keeping an eye on my search referrals to see if there’s another big boost in them.

Another plugin I finally caved and got is Noze Graze’s Ultimate Book Blogger Plugin. I’ve been flirting with this for a while and hopefully it will speed up review posts since I spend so much time getting everything over from goodreads, copy pasting back and forth. I’m excited to start using it but also a bit worried since it was pricey and so far I’ve not gotten the hang of it, currently the covers aren’t displaying right.

I also got “Easy Table of Contents” which I plan to mostly use for my mini-review posts to have a nice little table at the top, I used to make those by hand by gave up after 3-4 because it’s so complicated.

Also I’ve used these for a while, but I swear my favorite plugins are two really simple ones: “WPFront Scroll Top” which gives me a little “back to top” that’s so useful in the editor, and “Word Count and Limit” that just shows me a little word count as I’m writing.

I also have a lot of plugins that I have no clue what they do, but I think my theme or something needed them and now I’m just afraid to uninstall.

How I manage my review index

Part of this maintence chaos energy boost I updated my review index, I have a spreadsheet for that not a plugin, so that may change in the future. This is the page, https://dianthaa.com/reviews-a-z/ and the spreadsheet looks like this:

I’ve got author name, book title, link to the post, and a field to add (mini-review) for the mini reviews.

I have a google sheet formula that splits the last name into a separate column so I can just add every at the bottom and then sort. That makes it easy to just copy the whole thing over the previous version rather than insert each new line in wordpress.

=RIGHT(A3,LEN(A3)–FIND(“<^>”,SUBSTITUTE(A3,” “,“<^>”,LEN($A$2)–LEN(SUBSTITUTE($A$2,” “,“”))),1)) 

And then that’s just copied as “values only” into the next cell to sort

Last formula gives me the html (I think) code that I just paste into the the text editor version of wordpress:

For the books:

=CONCATENATE (“<!– wp:paragraph –><p>”,A3,” “,“<a href=”,char(34), C3,char(34),“><strong>”,B3,“</strong></a>”,” “,D3,“</p><!– /wp:paragraph –>”)

For the letter headings:

=CONCATENATE (“<!– wp:heading –><h2 id=”,char(34),A2,char(34),“>”,A2,“</h2><!– /wp:heading –>”)

And the table of contents at the top is just this:

<h2><a href=”#A”>A</a> – <a href=”#B”>B</a> – <a href=”#C”>C</a> – <a href=”#D”>D</a> – <a href=”#E”>E</a> – <a href=”#F”>F</a> – <a href=”#G”>G</a> – <a href=”#H”>H</a> – <a href=”#I”>I</a> – <a href=”#J”>J</a> – <a href=”#K”>K</a> – <a href=”#L”>L</a> – <a href=”#M”>M</a> – <a href=”#N”>N</a> – <a href=”#O”>O</a> – <a href=”#P”>P</a> – <a href=”#Q”>Q</a> – <a href=”#R”>R</a> – <a href=”#S”>S</a> – <a href=”#T”>T</a> – <a href=”#U”>U</a> – <a href=”#V”>V</a> – <a href=”#W”>W</a> – <a href=”#X”>X</a> – <a href=”#Y”>Y</a> – <a href=”#Z”>Z</a> </h2>

I don’t actually know why I did this whole entire section, but probably to procrastinate actually updating it. Maybe it helps someone. I didn’t come up with the formulas myself, I had tons of help from Christine @ Black Forest Basilisk, and another blogless reddit mod.

Also thanks to chaos energy I can now tell you I have 150 reviews posted to GoodReads and 73 I still need to copy. I daren’t check amazon cause whenever I try to post they don’t like it for various reasons.

Books read

• Invisible Kingdom, Vol. 2: Edge of Everything, by G. Willow Wilson – this was alright, the colors are pretty but not a huge fan
• Mooncakes by Suzanne Walker, Wendy Xu – reread, so lovely and comforting
• The Eternal Champion (Eternal Champion, #1) by Michael Moorcok – went better than expecting, pretty modern in some ways
• The Deep & Dark Blue by Niki Smith – lovely, wholesome, very pretty art
• The Philosopher’s Flight (The Philosophers Series, #1) by Tom Miller – good book, wrong timing
• Child of the Daystar (The Wings of War, #1) by Bryce O’Connor – enjoyed the begining, then lost interest.

Blog posts

• r/Fantasy Top Novels Poll: My 10 (+) favorite Fantasy and Sci-Fi books of all time
• Top Ten Tuesday: Books that make me happy
• A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark
• Top Ten Tuesday: Thirsty edition
• July and August Wrap-Up: we were on a break
• Mini reviews – Black Sun, The Left Hand of Darkness, Abhorsen, The Legends of the First Empire, Too Like the Lightning, Piranesi, The Relentless Moon, Season of the Witch
• Top Ten Tuesday: Books I wish I could read again for the first time

I’m linking up with The Sunday Post, hosted by Kimberly @ Caffeinated Reviewer. and The Sunday Salon, hosted by Deb at Readerbuzz, and Stacking the Shelves hosted Team Tynga’s Reviews and Reading Reality