Cafe Arcane Redesign Updates
Made some good progress and, as expected, came across some additional things I discovered I wanted to change, improve, remove or add. I’m still not completely settled on the home/landing page, particularly content (featured widgets) and the logo design. I have eliminated or further isolated some problems from my early”housekeeping” post though…
PHP errors in Related Articles footers: These are caused by posts that do not have tags. Shame on me, but some are so old that they pre-date the common practice of tagging WordPress posts. I’ve written a simple template tool to find all untagged Posts and I’m using it to track down delinquent Posts. I’ll share it and other information over at It’s WordPress.com in the week to come so other can benefit from it.
Rebuild & expand image galleries: I finally decided on an organization system for photos that works for me. I’m also completing the slow migrating from the long-suffering Plogger to NextGen that I started so long ago and have been lax about completing. I think this will be good all around, since NextGen is more tightly integrated with WordPress and also facilitates faster integration of new and backlogged photos. I’d also like to extend the NextGen functionality to include video support.
Portfolio: Currently this is still off in its own mini-site but that is starting to show its age (both in format and content) so I plan to bring it into the Content Management System proper while simultaneously adding new content.
Shortcode functions: While I’m gutting so many theme templates and legacy code of the old site, I figure it is also a good time to add new functionality, much of which would not integrate well with the old theme. These will allow me to invoke various effects, formats and shortcuts without having to hand code them each and every time.
Google Plus Syndicator: This one is still in the research phases, but I’d REALLY like the ability to syndicate or co-publish my content here and on my Google Plus page. Right now there are some serious limitations in the current Google Plus API so I’ve been dragging my feet a bit hoping they add more functionality.
QA old content for issues: I hope it goes without saying that many old posts and deep content may need to be updated, particularly ones that relied on the old gallery system, obsolete embeds, dead links (thankfully mod_rewrite saved me from the worst of this) and legacy code.
Forms: The old contact form looks downright ugly in the new redesign, so I’ll probably take the opportunity to upgrade my form processing system to Contact Form 7 while I’m at it. CF7 might be a bit of overkill for this site, but on the other hand it might inspire me to find new uses for it.
Monetize: I’d like to do some very light monetization, basically I’d like the site to “pay for itself” without cluttering the content or inconveniencing readers. I think the best way to do this is to only monetize OLDER pages. Perhaps content older than 60 days. Whatever I decide, I will not utilize invasive or unrelated ads. Probably stick with Google Adsense just to be safe.
Bonus Round: Did I mention that I have thousands of articles in XML format from the REALLY OLD version of this site. Think PHPNuke days. They need a little validation help, but afterwards, they could be imported to provide a look at the “missing years” of Cafe Arcane.
