Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

Done editing

I think I finished editing and republishing old entries yesterday. The grand total is that I have 1,362 posts, with a word count of 1,059,000 or so words. I’m finding that this is big enough that it cripples either of the main SEO plugins for WordPress. That would be a problem if I was trying to make money on real estate or vitamin sales, but I’m not, so I disabled it.

I still need to figure out this theme – it feels like the headings are too big and inefficient, and I do miss having the widgets on the side for the archives and such. And I need to have better integration with this and Facebook and/or Twitter. I would like to just blog here and spend a lot less time on social media sites.

Another thing I need to do is there are a ton of posts that have no title, which doesn’t work well with the various widgets at the bottom of the page. But the idea of going through a few hundred posts and adding dumb titles like “ate lunch” is a bit exhausting. I just did a big run of them, and I think I still have a few hundred more to go.

Now that this stuff is almost settled, I need to figure out what I’m doing with this thing. My only real goal is the same one I have every January 1: a new post every day. But I don’t know what to post about. After reading every post over the last week, I feel like I’ve already strip-mined any old stories of memories and nostalgia. There definitely won’t be any trip reports in the near future, and not a lot of day-to-day news except “sat in my home office for twelve hours and then watched four hours of Married at First Sight.” I guess I need to step up the reading and should do something more constructive with my boob tube time.

Definitely no current events or politics. The upside of all of this tedium is I spent a lot less time looking at the news. So there’s that. I should probably go back into my list of starred Wikipedia articles and write about each of them. I have a bad habit of falling down k-holes, starring articles, and then wondering why the hell I bookmarked comparative religion scholar Frithjof Schuon years ago. (Still trying to figure this out – only thing I can think of is he died in Bloomington. Maybe I helped him with his VAX mail at some point.)

Not a lot to report otherwise. It was a typical NYE, and I was asleep by about ten. We rented The King of Staten Island and I was very mixed on it. I should write a longer post on it, but it’s lunch time.


Comments

3 responses to “Done editing”

  1. I use this theme on my dev.jimgrey.net blog. It’s …okay. Hard to make it look like anything other than This Theme.

    1. Is that the 2021 theme? I’m using the 2020 theme now. I like that it’s reactive and is readable on a phone, but I don’t think it’s really designed for writing thousand-word posts every day.

      I think it’s like 520 pixels across and I tried making it more like 720 and it completely botched how image wrapping worked.

      There was a time when I actually knew enough about CSS to make simple changes to these things, but themes have become so complicated, I think you pretty much either have to use the defaults, pay someone, or be a real web developer.

      1. I’m not a CSS expert but I can fumble my way through it all right most of the time. But WordPress theme column width is a nut I’ve never been able to crack. I just try to find a theme with a column width I can live with.

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