New Stuff in 2017

2017-05-02 The past few days I create a video sitemap following Google recommendations. I also adjust the robots.txt file to include the image and video xml sitemaps in addition to the regular one.

2017-04-18 After a couple weeks of extra sadness I improve the page titles of fifteen song pages. I also make minor changes to some other pages.

2017-04-05 I create pages for two songs (E upbeat and Why Didn't I Follow?) that until now did not have their own. I finish embedding responsive YouTube videos into all the pages of my feature album including those pages. Then I add those two new links to the sitemaps (htm, xml, urllist.txt), album page and songs index.

2017-04-01 I remove the Search button from the top of 255 pages. According to Google Analytics nobody ever uses it—they use the Sitemap button instead—so it shouldn't be taking up screen space especially at the top of the page. Unlike my usual practice I do not adjust the dateModified meta tags even though this change affects the appearance of every page. It would take time to do so, and I figure I can do that for any succeeding changes (which are bound to happen).

2017-03-28 Today I edit 267 pages—basically every page of my website. I remove the html5shiv javascript and change the breadcrumbs container element from div to nav. Both of these are recommendations (warnings, not errors) of the CSE HTML validator. I did research yesterday on both issues before doing this. I also change the meta tag of the schema.org version from 3.1 to 3.2 and change all the dateModified tags to today's date. I worked on the website in the past week too but did not keep notes on what I did or when.

2017-03-20 After I email the creator of the software I used yesterday, he tells me I am the first one to discover an error that led me to shorten my page titles far too much yesterday. I lengthen the twelve shortest page titles to bring them closer to the ideal length for mobile displays. Each time I edit them they are improved.

2017-03-19 I edit 127 pages today. Nearly all the edits are choosing words and word order to shorten the pixel width of page titles.

2017-03-18 I upload an image site map to the Webmaster Tools of Google, Bing and Yandex. I have been working on it the past couple of days, learning as I go.

2017-03-15 Today I edit and add to the structured data of bicycle images in the schwinn folder. I did the same yesterday for cat images in the caldecat, cats and pandora folders.

2017-03-11 I add more bibliographic structured data to my page about G. K. Chesterton.

2017-03-09 Today I redid the alt text of the paw images on the Beagle books and movies page, adjusted the html and css of the Beagley Memories page and added more structured data to its images, and used the figure and figcaption elements of html5 to mark up two poems on the G. K. Chesterton page.

2017-03-07 I edit the descriptions of the ten songs of my album playlist on The Bicycling Guitarist YouTube channel. Eight of those songs have pages on my website. I make the descriptions to the video links on those pages (structured data not visible on the page) match those on the YouTube channel. I also adjust the Site map and the Ranchero index page.

2017-03-06 I edit the primary navigation links on 251 pages to be absolute URL (full path) instead of relative URL. This is to protect the site from scrapers and also to be consistent for SEO and accessibility reasons.

2017-03-05 I edit three dozen pages. Twenty-nine of these are the Comments pages where I adjusted the CSS three weeks ago but closed with a parenthesis instead of a curly bracket!

2017-03-03 I edit one hundred forty pages today. Nearly all the edits were very slight improvements to the html5 code.

2017-03-01 I edit the meta descriptions and meta keywords on forty-two pages.

2017-02-28 I add tags with the schema version 3.1 to every page of the website (268 pages but only about 240 of them are public). I also change the dateModifed meta tags to today's date. I edit keywords on several pages and make some other slight changes.

2017-02-27 I add the archive pages for 2017 (this one) and 2016 to the sitemap.xml (the one for the search engines, not humans). I also spend some time moving web pages up or down in their priority on the sitemap.xml page so I can have a nice symmetrical graph of them. I edit the keywords for content and length on several other pages.

2017-02-26 I edit more than fifty pages including the home page and many related to R Band. I add more structured data to the Fokker Triplane speech (in three days it has gone from 320 structured data statements to 480). Yesterday I edited more than forty pages. Most of these edits were very slight improvements to the html5 code.

2017-02-22 Today I finish saving all the pages of my website to the Internet Archive at archive.org. I started a couple of days ago. I also add structured data and other minor changes to a couple dozen web pages.

2017-02-19 I finish editing itemid attributes changing them to sameAs links after learning a couple days ago that is better. The five hundred edits done yesterday were on more than a hundred web pages, but the one hundred edits done today were all on one essay (Thoughts on Seversky's book Victory Through Air Power). I also make slight changes to a few other pages and replace the code for the Google custom search engine with a newer version.

2017-02-16 I add structured data to the bibliographies of my two essays about Ishi (the last wild Native American). I did some yesterday.

2017-02-15 I make slight changes to the CSS code on twenty-nine comments pages to my R Band songs. These pages are several levels deep inside my website and are not likely to get many views, but I know they are there and I want them to look good.

2017-02-14 I add a little more bibliographic structured data here and there, but the biggest accomplishment is manually replacing the Google Analytics code on every page with a newer version of the code. I want to keep up to date especially where Google is concerned!

2017-02-12 I add more structured data to the bibliographies of some essays as I have been doing the past few days.

2017-02-09 I edit the markup for two essays and learned more about structured data for bibliographies. I also rearrange the song list for my album and make the songs index page, album page, sitemap and YouTube playlist all have the same ten songs in the same order.

2017-02-08 The past couple days I add better structured data for the bibliographies of two essays. On another essay (Thoughts on Seversky's book Victory Through Air Power) I delete some superfluous structured data. I lengthen the character length and pixel width of short title tags on five pages yesterday and six pages today. I also edit eight song pages.

2017-02-05 Today I learn more about how to do structured data for bibliographic entries. I also do various online tests of my website. I edit the character length and pixel width of the meta description tags and title tags on eight web pages today and seven pages yesterday to make them more consistent with all the other pages.

2017-02-03 Inside the head tag of every page on my website I move the viewport meta tag up from its previous position to just below the charset meta tag and just above the title tag. The CSE HTML Validator recommends this as best practice. This takes some time because I edit each page manually.

2017-02-02 I make major changes to the song list for my proposed album When you ride over sharps, you get flats! This also results in changing the songs index page, the site map, and the breadcrumbs navigation links on twelve affected song pages.

2017-01-31 On five webpages I correct six links that had Status Code 301 Moved Permanently. I also change some outdated html markup on another page.

2017-01-28 For the first time ever my site now has the favicon file correctly formatted and not just for desktop browsers but for other devices (iPhone, Android). I add html code to the headers of more than 250 pages today after uploading several images and related files to the root directory of my web site a couple days ago.

2017-01-24 I focus on my website all day and edit 190 pages. First I remove the “About me” navigation buttons from the top left of the pages and move the “Sitemap” button there to make the site more user-friendly especially for those using mobile devices.

I also switch the position of the “Songs” and “Schwinn” buttons so they are in the same order of bicycles and then guitars as in my stage name. After working on the navigation buttons I go back to the bottom of those pages and delete the “AddToAny” share buttons that have cookies and use scripts. So far as I know they did not help bring any traffic to my site since I started using them in 2009.