Featured image: “Magical Girls: Chocoandvanilla” by hieihirai.
The end of the year is approaching. The second novel is coming along nicely, though I don’t think I’ll have the draft finished quite when I wanted. But I’m down to two major action sequences and the ending left to be drafted, so it’s drawing to a close. The draft of the second volume is considerably longer than the first book was.
Also, I’ve performed some of the much-needed blog maintenance. Hoping to make this blog a lot lighter, I’ve examined a lot of the scripts and such and determined that most of them are coming straight from WordPress. I lack the technical expertise to do much about it, though I did go through and delete various extraneous plugins while playing with the others to see if they were affecting content and load time. I managed to strip out some of the excess, but not as much as I’d like.
A few plugins I’d like to get rid of, but can’t; for example, I have a plugin for the “classic” editor because the new, much-touted Gutenberg editor is basically unusable. Whatever idiot thought it would be a good idea to remove the ability to insert special characters or indented text deserves a sound spanking.
Frankly, WordPress is going the wrong direction: it’s supposed to be the most powerful blogging platform, but it’s instead trying to be Blogging for Dummies. Their HTML editor even strips out most of the valid HTML I put into it—including microdata markup. It treats bloggers like idiots.
On the plus side, I test-drove some free plugins for structured data and found one I quite like. This means absolutely nothing on your end, since it’s invisible, but it (might) on my end mean more traffic and prettier results in search engines. One reason I’m writing this post is because I’m going to immediately turn around and run it through a validation service to make sure the markup is working properly.
