Whimsical.nu

Welcome to a Whimsical Blog~

Hi, I'm Angela, a girl with a blog on five different psyches:
girl, geek, reader, writer, gamer
Choose your poison ♥

WordPress page keywords and descriptions

These days, the page meta tags for keywords and descriptions are generally ignored for SEO, as search engines get more and more sophisticated and as people try and cheat rankings by padding their meta tags with words. I haven’t been paying attention to it myself, but that’s not any reason to get shoddy with meta tags!

Sometimes page descriptions do matter: they show up in search result pages, when sharing links in Facebook, and other small things. For a WordPress blog though, these aren’t usually baked in by default. Your keywords and description are actually your website’s description!

That isn’t very helpful when you’re sharing a link and a description of your whole blog shows up instead of what the link is all about. :/

So I sat down one day and tried to figure it out for my blog. Because of how my blog is set up, I wanted the following things:

  • Category pages should reflect keywords and description of the whole category.
  • Single post pages should reflect an excerpt of the post for the description, and post category and post tags for the keywords.

And here is my function. :)

function get_keywords_description( &$keywords, &$description ) {

    if( is_home() ) {
        // home page should have blog-wide description and keywords
        $description = get_bloginfo('description');
        $keywords = "list,of,keywords,here";
        return;
    }

    if( is_category() ) {
        //categories you actually want to track/"specialize"
    	$CATEGORIES = array( 3, 4, 5 );

    	global $post;
    	$categories = get_the_category( $post->ID );
    	$current_top_category = 0;
    	foreach( $categories as $c ) {
    		if( in_array( $c->cat_ID, $CATEGORIES ) ) {
    			$current_top_category = $c->cat_ID;
    			break;
    		}
    	}
        $cat_info = get_category( $current_top_category );
        $description = "{$cat_info->name}: {$cat_info->description}";
        switch( $current_top_category ) {
            case '3' :
                $keywords = "list,of,keywords,here";
                break;
            case '4' :
                $keywords = "list,of,keywords,here";
                break;
            case '5' :
                $keywords = "list,of,keywords,here";
                break;
        }
        return;
    }

    // not home page, and not category page
    if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post();
        $description = get_the_excerpt();
    endwhile; endif;
    rewind_posts();

    global $post;
    $tags = get_the_tags($post->ID);
    $cats = get_the_category($post->ID);
    foreach( $tags as $t ) {
        $keywords .= "{$t->name}, ";
    }
    foreach( $cats as $c ) {
        $keywords .= "{$c->name}, ";
    }
    $keywords = rtrim($keywords,', ');
}

Actual usage is pretty straightforward.

<?php
$keywords = $description = '';
get_keywords_description( $keywords, $description );
?>
<meta name="description" content="<?php echo $description; ?>">
<meta name="keywords" content="<?php echo $keywords; ?>">

It’s not as elegant as I’d like–look at those horrid loops, and the use of the global $post–so if you have any suggestions on how to make it better, let me know!

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A month with the editorial calendar

It’s been a month since I’ve started using an editorial calendar on Whimsical.nu to help me stay organized and motivated with blogging. It’s been four weeks, enough time for Firefox to know that I want my editorial calendar whenever I type “cal” into the address field. Enough time to get into the swing of things.

And we are definitely swinging.

I wouldn’t call it the best thing since sliced bread, but it’s quite close. Anyone who’s known me for a while online can probably tell: I’ve never blogged this regularly before. Using the editorial calendar for a month has helped me develop a (public-) writing habit, which I’ve not done for many years now. It may not be creative writing, but just having the habit back again is a good enough start.

The setup

I’ve stuck to my weekly plan: each weekday, at 10am, a post goes up on a certain category.

  1. Mondays are for personal, life-related entries;
  2. Tuesdays are for geeky and tech stuff;
  3. Wednesdays are for posts on writing;
  4. Thursdays are for books;
  5. and Fridays are for gaming-related articles.

How soon a post is ready for scheduling really depends. I’ve had posts ready almost a week before, but I’ve also written a post right the same morning it was supposed to go up (call it an epiphany: I suddenly thought of a better topic to post about than the one I had scheduled).

For the calendar itself, I use the Editorial Calendar WordPress plugin. I’ve modified it slightly to change the colors of the table cells, to give me a visual cue of which days are for which categories (shown below).

I move posts around in the calendar by dragging them between weeks, but always never by too much. I keep post ideas as blank posts in the calendar, and keep them in the next week’s category-day for later perusal. It’s fairly quick to type in a topic for a title, add a couple notes in bullet and plain text (that’s how this entry started!), and return to it at a later date.

Two weeks onward in the Editorial Calendar

Two weeks onward in the Editorial Calendar

The photo above is a good example of what two weeks forward in the calendar looks like, for me. I have fairly set posts planned for the Geek, Writer, and Gamer categories in the October 4-8 week, and most of the other post ideas have been moved to the next weeks for those categories. I still have not decided on which post ideas to develop for the Girl and Reader categories here, so I have a couple of choices still up for those days.

The good things

The visual prompt of the WordPress plugin is certainly helping me focus on blogging. With a glance, I can see problem points: oh no, I still don’t have a post for the next Writer category! (which is an all-too-often occurrence here, sigh). I can see a quick overview of what topics I’ve already thought of, and pick one to write in when I have time and the inspiration to write about it.

Scheduling posts, instead of quickly posting them after they’re written, is also putting me in a less stressed-out frame of mind. (I hear planning can do that for you.) They also go out at 10am every day, which is a plus (although, well, my 10am is not the whole world’s 10am!).

Things to work on

As with any system, I still need to work out a couple of things. The most significant one would probably be a way to balance light and heavy posts easily. With the way I’ve set things up, there’s no easy way for me to quickly gauge a post’s “weight”. Always writing heavy, content-rich posts can be rather tiring, and honestly it should also be fairly monotonous to readers. Fun, lighter posts would definitely be a good way to break things up a little.

But I suppose that’s also one thing I need to work on: the art of making short, light posts. They sometimes seem to be the most challenging to write! After all, a content-rich post is usually something I feel relatively strongly about, enabling me to talk about it at some length (the usual challenge is: what to not-say in a post!). Lighter posts make me sometimes feel that I’m being a cop-out, or boring. A photo as a post? How interesting is that? A list of links? But how do I choose good links?

I would also like to eventually be able to post on weekends, although currently I don’t think I can handle such a rigorous blogging schedule. Just this weekend was spent writing/finishing a couple of posts–set for the whole week, and a few more days onward. An additional 2 posts/week would be a bit on the heavy side.

A new habit that’s here to stay

I’m pretty pleased that I’ve been able to integrate blogging, and the editorial calendar, into my life: this is something that’s definitely here to stay. I may tweak a couple more things about it as I work with the process: it’s a living process, something that needs to evolve: and it’s flexible enough to evolve with me.

Is this style of blogging for everyone? Probably not. More personal blogs will likely not need this kind of setup. One-man blogs might not need such a system, as well. But the organization and focus an editorial calendar provides–any editorial calendar system, whichever tool you use–certainly has its perks, and is worth a month’s look-see.

Useful resources

To end, here are a couple useful blog posts and resources regarding using editorial calendars for blogging–not details may be applicable but I’ve picked up ideas here and there from these:

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New layout, and tinkering with WordPress categories

I’ve been working on and off on this new layout for a while, but today I’ve doubled down to get it all coded and running. Nothing was wrong with the older layout, of course, but I just felt it was a little cluttered, and I felt somewhat pressured to write longer posts just to fill up all that space in line with the contents on the sidebar. Ergh. I also wanted a more obvious division between different categories, but not so much that moving from one category to the next would be a jarring experience.

So I came up with this :D I am rather pleased with it, especially for the coding that’s gone behind it. The layout has a lot of specific handling depending on which category the currently-visible post is in:

  1. Cartoon head background and post “icon” obviously depend on the post’s category; click on each of the categories to see them all.
  2. Where possible, I use the category’s “color” to indicate categories, such as the footer background, and the most recent category posts on the top right of the header.
  3. The top right header obviously shows the most recent post from each category–except, of course, when you’re already viewing that post!
  4. Post title color will also mirror the category the post belongs to.
  5. The next and back links found at the post’s meta area will also mirror the type of posts you’re scrolling through. A brown arrow means you’re not in a category!
  6. The contents of the footer will also vary slightly depending on the “active” category.

To pull most of the styling changes off, I needed the category of the post on the page itself, as well as on various areas of the blog to get the proper information. This wasn’t a problem for category pages, but for all the rest? I ended up doing a small bit of hackery (note this will only work on pages that contain just one post), and crossing my fingers that my blog won’t break in future WP versions:

function get_current_top_category() {
	$CATEGORIES = array(
		3 => 'girl',
		4 => 'geek',
		5 => 'reader',
		6 => 'writer',
		7 => 'gamer'
	);
	$current_top_category = 0;

	global $post;
	$post_id = $post->ID;
	$categories = get_the_category( $post_id );
	foreach( $categories as $c ) {
		if( in_array( $c->slug, $CATEGORIES ) ) {
			$current_top_category = $c->cat_ID;
			break;
		}
	}
	return $current_top_category;
}

The function works well both with just getting the current category for content manipulation, as well as adding an extra class to the body tag, as mentioned in this post via the body_class function.

All that said, I still need to get a couple of things working. I haven’t checked on IE browsers yet (and I don’t have any more plans of checking IE6… *shakes fist at it*), and I need to optimize the PNGs I used; I also want comments to show on each page, even if it’s not the single post page; and a couple more meta stuff couldn’t hurt, probably! They will all need to be done at a later date, though; I’m bushed!

Let me know if you see anything glaringly wrong :D

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On websites and one sentences

I finally whipped up a new layout and upgraded my WordPress installation to 2.1.1, from pre-2.1; I previously never had time (or much energy, actually) to try upgrading. Besides, I was getting tired of the old layout.

That over and done with, I found a gem of a website yesterday, and I’ve been itching to note it somewhere: One Sentence. Basically, people submit one-sentence true stories. From the website itself:

One Sentence is about telling your story, briefly. Insignificant stories, everyday stories, or turning-point-in-your-life stories, boiled down to their bare essentials.

I love websites and exercises like these, both as a visitor/reader and as a participant. For one thing, there are beautiful one-sentence stories found here, wonderfully written, sentences that struck me the moment I read them: with sadness, with joy, with nostalgia. See here:

I am pregnant with my husband’s child, so I will never get to be with the man who is the mirror of my soul.
- fallen phoenix

And there she left me clueless, on the eve of her mother’s wedding day.
- dac

As I leaned to kiss her on the cheek, she decided the lips would be better, and my heart stopped mid-beat.
- Chris

(Yes, I am a sap, they’re all about love. So sue me.) This website reminds me of goodies like Post Secret (and the 983712467322 copies), so unimaginably engrossing, but on a less sensational level. It’s so nifty I immediately started thinking of my own one-sentence-story — which I feel is a great catalyst when it comes to creative writing. Or any one of these sentences could form the basis of a story, of a novel.

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Now Reading

I’d like to sing praises of the Now Reading WordPress plugin, which was just what I was looking for. In any case, I’d like to finally officially put up my library, and it’s now linked on the main navigation. ♥ I love how the plugin works. Yay! I haven’t integrated the widgets yet with my miscellany section, but it will get there soon. Book reviews will still be posted here in the main blog, and linked/included on the book page itself. :)

On to the actual plugin review — the plugin was very easy to install (no PHP files to edit), and easy to get used to as well. Clean interface, plus almost all information you would need in a library plugin — book status, rating, review section (even if I’m not using it), when you started reading and when you finished. Plus meta tags for everything else! I had fun adding a few meta information of my own, like the language of the book I’m reading (English? Filipino? Translated from what language?) or the series it belongs to. I could probably keep going on and on with the meta information, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself. ;)

I did modify my installation a bit to serve my needs a little; such as:

  • return the post ID connected to the book; this was important to me because I didn’t plan on using the reviews section of the plugin, but keep posting my reviews here in the blog (since I review not just books but writing tools/sites/etc as well); I needed the post ID in order to be able to add the actual post into the book’s page (with the help of the Get-a-Post plugin)
  • allow for books with no finish dates in the average_books function; since I plan to store past books (as opposed to “books from this point onwards”) as well in the library (like Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice) and I wouldn’t know when I started/finished them as it’s so long ago, I needed to modify the function to make sure it excludes those books from the computation
  • fix usage of the $echo parameter for the book_rating function; I do a lot of if() statements in my templates (if there is this information, if there is that, etc) and since I was showing rating information, I needed this to work

Of course, that doesn’t mean that the plugin isn’t robust enough on its own — not at all! It’s just a little more customization to meet my specific needs.

Speaking of customization, this plugin was fun to customize to fit my theme. There’s a bit of a challenge in the sense that there was a lot to look out for, but oy vey, I was quite pleased with the end result. Actually, it made me feel like I wanted to change/redesign my website layout to fully utilize the wonderfulness of the plugin’s customization ability!

I obviously don’t have any complaints, but if there’s anything I’d be interested in seeing in the future, it would be the two following things: a link to the Amazon detail page once you turn up search results for the book in the WP admin panel, to check if it’s the edition you want (especially important for books that don’t have cover images); second, the ability to easily update the “edition” of a book. I’m guessing that this might be easily done by updating the ISBN in the database, but I haven’t looked too deeply yet into how the plugin is made to be able to say it for certain. I’d love that feature since I’ve added a few books I’m still looking for, and I might not get the editions I wanted.

I’d definitely recommend this plugin to any WordPress blogger who’re looking to incorporate their reading habits into their blog. It’s fun, powerful, and most especially easy to use.

P.S. If anyone have got plugins for this plugin (imagine that, even plugins for a plugin! *squishes it*) I would love to hear about them. ♥

2 Comments

Alive, but WordPress ate my words

I had been writing out a fairly long ramble on the effect of music and rhythm in my writing, and then WordPress decided it was hungry and gobbled up my words, every single one of them, the poor dears. I was quite upset, and I’m upset enough not to want to even try recreating what I was talking about in the aforementioned dearly departed entry.

However, I will continue to ask: if you listen to music while writing (creative fiction/nonfiction), what is it? I personally gravitate towards the music of Loreena McKennitt when I’m writing, most especially The Lady of Shallott (from her album The Visit) and The Highwayman (from The Book of Secrets). I don’t think it’s a coincidence that those songs are based from beautiful, heart-wrenching poems, but yes. I’m curious as to what everyone else listens to; and maybe to also get a few recommendations as to what other artists or albums I should try. My friend Caroline led me to Joni Mitchell, and I think her Song to a Seagull is precious; and it’s opened my eyes that, zomg, there must be more writing music out there!

Lastly, I know there are some who read poetry before writing, sort of to stimulate the mind and ready it for writing because actually plunging in. I think is is especially useful for me, as I tend to pick up rhythm and style from what I read, and it goes out into my writing (this happens very frequently with Jane Eyre–after reading it for just a few hours, I end up writing like Charlotte Bronte for days, if I don’t realize it before and correct myself). If anyone else does this, care to share which poets always brings out the writer in you?

Additionally, this is shameless pimpage of my new Vox account–you may now find me there under the very shocking username of angelamaria. I’m still debating whether to treat it as a book log (because it can be! omgsquee!), but I feel like I’d be then ignoring all its other strengths, so I am totally unsure. I can always have my book log/review thing here, as I’ve always, always had it in my head to put one up.

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