Live Truly

In between classes, holidays/fam events, flu, and workouts, I’m working on updating and cleaning up most of my sites, including this one. The theme update is the first step. I think it’s nice and clean.

I’ve changed the blog theme to the Zinmag Futura. However, I don’t need most of the flashy gizmos, and so I disabled them. But I love the thumbs and the rotating front page featured and slide/glide menu. The only issue I’ve had was with the thumbnails links not working correctly (discussion thread), but hopefully that gets cleaned up soon. Also, I just found out that Zinmag Redox had exactly the things I wanted without the extra features (for anyone that wants to save an hour or two in setting things up).

I added Sociable and Akismet, I love these two plugins. My amazon link plugin (which really speeds up getting the book pictures) doesn’t work with the latest version of wordpress. I also used the built-in tag cloud feature of wordpress. In the future I plan to add a photofeed and a connection to 43things.

I’ve also been cleaning up the categories. I don’t have it fully planned out, but the plan is to simplify and make them more natural. Most of the book posts will go into the book categories, financial stuff will go in its own category, job stuff in its own category rather than being split among three or four. I don’t know how relevant this categorization stuff really is since I don’t believe in categories (tags are a far better metaphor for describing the world) but nevertheless we all categorize things to help us make quick decisions (for better or worse) so for now I’ll play along. It’ll also help with the thumbnails (for posts which don’t have a specific thumb, adding category-based generics makes sense).

OK, time to go study. Have a great day.

After trying to think of a way to list the categories in the archives using list_cats, which has an insane amount of display options, an far easier idea came into my head. I left the descriptions for search and archive pages blank for now and simply added the keywords to the static pages. Oh dear, that’s the solution for descriptions as well. Haha, two hours of reading documentation and an unrelated solution that took than less than a minute to implement.

For the specific categories, again I tried playing with the plugin and the various options, but in the end I decided the easiest thing to do would be to simply list the category descriptions in the keywords. Grammar words like ‘and’ or ‘the’ may take weaken my word list, but it should add relevance and at visibility until I figure out a better way.

Here’s the new code on startingrealestate.com:

<meta name="keywords" content="<?php if (is_home()) {echo 'real estate blog training lessons';} elseif (is_category()) {echo category_description();} else {echo get_the_keywords('',' ','','');} ?>" />

Alright, have to run. This optimization business is becoming addictive.

This morning (I got up an hour ago, still jetlagged), I added categories to my Starting Real Estate Blog. I’m still not sure to the best way to break things down, as cognitive science philosophy and linguistics drilled us, “Categories don’t contain items, rather items have properties that describe them.” There are no essences. Sorry Aristotle. It would be nice to get some advice about label though. There’s a General one that contains all the posts. I’m still debating whether to get rid of that one. So far I have three labels: Purpose, Advice, and Education. Because right now most of the advice is about education, the two overlap a lot, just like they do in life. I hope search engines don’t get upset that the category pages overlap a lot. Does anyone have tips on this topic?

Looking at the ads on a course materials post, none of them seemed very relevant, they were on books and courses, but on completely different topics. The description was “my courses and books” and the keywords are “courses books real estate principles practice”. Just to check, I added “Real Estate” to the description (”My Real Estate courses and books”). Bam! Immediately all the ads grew in relevance, all were about Real Estate exams and courses. I know changing the title to include those words will have an even greater effec, but when it comes to content, I’d rather keep things clean.

Update: Simply changing the order of the keywords and description on this post: moving “niche blog”, “meta description”, and “ads” to the front and “category label” to the back changed the ads from office supplies to webpage optimizations on this post. I love how you can see results right away.