Image by Jake Mates via Flickr

I’ve finally wrangled the loose ends on this blog which have held me back from posting more often. Certain elements of this blog theme have seemed limiting to me, in the past, but I now realize that it’s more the application of those plugins which have really needed a DAY’s worth of analysis. Seriously. A day.
I wasn’t thrilled with the homepage, the page you’re first presented with when you visit cateyefotos.com/blog. It was very very busy, with all of my social networking plugins activated and visible on the first page. What’s worse is the fact that I was displaying 3 posts FULL PAGE, which basically made my BOUNCE rate suffer- how or why would anybody navigate to anything else on my site when it looked like all of my most recent posts were splattered right there.

The fix, I realize was the use of the shortcode tag within my posts. When applied in the middle of a post, the tag will create a “Read more” or “read entire post” link to the entire post , which for some reason is more effective in getting people to click to the SINGLE post page where the theme is less busy and has a more focused content delivery, the user experience I prefer the readers to have. The trouble is, in order to implement the more tag into all of my posts I would have to individually edit ALL of them. Luckily, I learned about the plugin called EVERMORE. This plugin will automatically edit the posts and cut down the content presented to the reader on the homepage, thus allowing a sleeker and more easily navigable experience. It allows the reader to choose what they want to “Read More” about , rather than being blasted with all this information on the front homepage. HIGHLY RECOMMEND the plugin. It has features which allow you to customize the amount of characters the filter will require before the “read more” link to the full post is shown , directing the reader to the more full text.

The second plugin I learned about is called Simply Exclude. The function of the plugin that I realized I needed recently is its ability to restrict certain tags or categories from appearing as blog posts on your homepage, the first page users see when typing your blog domain. This may not be a necessary plugin for everyone, but for me became necessary with the conjunction of another plugin which I decided to use a few months ago, Ozh’ Tweet Archiver. This plugin does just what it says, archives your tweets. If you use twitter, and depending on how you use it, you might like to have a historical record of all the tweets you post. The plugin will import ALL of your tweets and create tags and categories for them. I have all of my tweets sent to the Twitter category here on my blog. Since I post a lot of informative links on twitter, I rather like the idea of having a somewhat permanent record of those links and their content easily accessible and searchable. The PROBLEM is that with sometimes as much as 40 tweets in a day, my blog homepage became riddled with short 140 character sentences and phrases, and there was little meat or content to consume here. Thats how and why Simply Exclude was able to revivify the blog. I could simply exclude all posts from the Twitter category from being seen on my homepage. A breath of fresh air again. Now it’s time to make this the blog of my vision, I’ll post more about my experience with WordPress, my hacking of css code..my botching of that code, and where I do have success with a plugin or with customizing some feature I now have the platform to share it without reserve.

I’ll probably try to write a post which outlines all of the plugins I’m currently running here, and tell a bit about what they do, more to come!

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