This is, admittedly, another update post. The reviews (and beatings) will continue once morale improves (and once I get home from vacation).
On the first interesting note, it appears that Amazon has recently dropped Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha and its two sequels, which I have previously reviewed. I’m glad I watched them before they disappeared. At the time of this writing, the tangentially related semi-sequel ViVid Strike! is still available, but I figure I better clear that from my plate before I get to anything else in case they’re going to drop that as well, so expect that review before, say, Chobits.
I’ll have more to say in the future about problems with Amazon and streaming services in general, but that’s for another post.
In terms of updates here, I’ve taken some bells and whistles off of features that rarely get used. I have also finally managed to make WordPress and Disqus talk to each other. They integrated fine in this blog’s early days, but then there were updates and Disqus created the most esoteric and user-unfriendly means of syncing the two. It took me probably three hours today, but I got it done.
I’ve also been working on adding markup to improve search engine results. Again, you probably care about that less than I do, but I think it’s kind of interesting. I have a new plugin that adds structured data, and for whatever the plugin can’t do, I do by hand by putting microdata into the HTML code, thanks to yet another plugin that stops WordPress from stripping out code it doesn’t recognize.
One thing I have unsurprisingly discovered is that … this is a heck of a lot of work. I spent most of the day going back through my reviews and marking them up, and I’m not even half done.
You can kind of see how this works from this screenshot of Google’s structured data testing tool, which hunts for errors in the markup. This is for my review of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A’s (may it rest in peace):
As you can see, the search engine can extract a lot of the information from the blog entry thanks to the markup.
This has some slim chance of raising the site’s ranking on search engines, but the main reason for this is to get what’s called “rich snippets,” where a site’s appearance on Google includes such eye-catching elements as images and star ratings. These are not a granted automatically just because a site has the right markup: Google bestows rich snippets when, how, and if it wills. Legend even has it that errors in the markup are worse than no markup at all.
So structured data is like a ritual for a pagan god, the great god Google: get it right and you may receive blessings, but get it wrong and you might get blasted instead.