I started my blog more as an experiment than anything else, and now I’ve started the next phase – well, I’ve started to get rid of the bits that don’t work, and started to tidy it all up.
As part of the experiment I’ve been using a lot of different plugins, methods for importing RSS feed content, and various other things that have clogged up the general, look, feel, and admin usability of the blog. I’ve now started to delete a lot of those things and take the blog a bit more seriously.
Doing this had worried me, though. I have created a lot off websites the old fashioned way (bog-standard HTML) and know how much of a hassle it was to code them in the first place – recoding them would have been a nightmare. Using WordPress it was a dream.
I deleted around 367 posts, and WordPress didn’t even blink. The deleted posts came from RSS feeds and, at best, contained two lines of text and then had a link to the full article on a different website. That would have been good if I just wanted traffic to pass straight through my blog, but not much use if I wanted them to hang around for a bit. The only possible downside was those posts had been index, so, the next step is to get a plugin that will redirect visitor to nonexistent links back to my home page.
Deleting so many posts would also have meant a whole load of work updating the XML site map on an old HTML website. Not so with a WordPress blog and Google XML Sitemap plugin, it does it automatically.
The last thing I decided to do was to re-order my categories.
This is another thing I’d have avoided like the plague if I were doing it on an HTML site. Finding all of the links and then changing them was something I’d done in the past, and vowed never to do again. However, on a WordPress blog, there’s nothing to it. You can create new categories, or use existing ones, and just move the old post to the new category without having to worry about missing any deep links to those posts.
These posts will still have the same URL’s, so there’s no need to worry about indexed pages not being found by people clicking through from the search engines.
There are new plugins and techniques coming out all the time, but I know now that I can try them out and make changes without doing any lasting damage to my blog.
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